Relief
March 2, 2007
Democratic House leaders, seeking to steal some of the spotlight from President Bush as he toured the Gulf, moved to pass legislation Thursday that will release hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds and speed relief to Hurricane Katrina-damaged areas, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on Thursday approved a bill that waives the 25 percent or 10 percent local match required of some FEMA funding and cancels repayment of Community Disaster loans. The leaders said they would attach the language to the emergency supplemental funding bill which Congress is expected to approve later this month.
Texas communities hit by Hurricanes Rita and Katrina would get the same full federal reimbursement for cleanup and recovery as Louisiana and Mississippi under an amendment approved Thursday by a House committee. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee unanimously approved an amendment by U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford, that would waive the 25 percent local match required to obtain federal hazard mitigation and rebuilding funds and direct emergency assistance for communities and individuals. The Houston Chronicle reports that the measure also would cancel the repayment of community disaster loans for the affected areas, ending the post-Katrina practice of designating such aid as loans rather than grants.
January 25, 2007
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco is questioning whether a beleaguered ICF International should run an $869 million program to restore rental housing in the hurricane-affected areas, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The Blanco administration hired ICF to manage federal funds for two programs: restoring owner-occupied homes and repairing rental property. The governor did not suggest canceling the homeowner portion of the private company's contract, though she has criticized ICF officials' handling of it. ICF is under fire for its management of the $7.5 billion Road Home program. ICF officials responded by saying they are eight weeks ahead of schedule on the rental program.
January 24, 2007
The Little Sisters of the Poor, a famed order of nuns who take a vow of poverty, say the city of New Orleans owes them a hefty sum of money after Hurricane Katrina. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has doled out $1.4 million to reimburse the order because one of its facilities, the Mary Joseph Residence for the Elderly in New Orleans, was used as an emergency operations center after the storm. But the money had to go through channels — first to the state and then to the city of New Orleans, reports The Associated Press. It has been sitting in the city's coffers for about a month and it could take several more weeks before the nuns receive the funding.
January 23, 2007
A six-month extension of emergency housing assistance will stave off an immediate catastrophe but will not solve the underlying problems preventing hurricane victims from rebuilding their lives, Katrina evacuees and their advocates said Monday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency confirmed that assistance would continue through Aug. 31 for about 128,000 households living in trailers, mobile homes or apartments, including about 14,000 in the Houston area. Leaders of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now are calling on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide permanent rental assistance vouchers to elderly and disabled evacuees, reports the Houston Chronicle.
A former Bolivar County, Mississippi, administrator pleaded guilty Monday to receiving a cash kickback from Hurricane Katrina relief funds. Adrian Brown, 29, made the plea in U.S. District Court in Aberdeen. He remains charged with witness tampering, reports The Associated Press. Brown, who had been administrator in Bolivar County since April 2004, was arrested by FBI agents at his office on June 6 for requesting and accepting kickbacks from the owner of a company that was hired to develop and maintain a Web site for the county to assist displaced Katrina evacuees. FEMA reimbursed the county $48,402 for the Web site.
Some doctors and researches believe a type of staph infection is causing skin lesions and sores that have shown up on Katrina-relief volunteers in recent months, reports The Associated Press. The lesions could be signs of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which has become increasingly common in south Mississippi, said Harris Evans, a doctor of internal medicine in Long Beach, Miss.
January 12, 2007
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has begun telling some Katrina evacuees in Texas that their rental subsidies will end late next month, producing new worries for families that haven't been able to re-establish themselves economically, several New Orleans evacuees said Thursday. The Times-Picayune reports that letters announcing the end of housing assistance in San Antonio have begun to go out to evacuees occupying once-vacant homes seized in foreclosures by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
January 4, 2007
As the Road Home rebuilding aid program for homeowners continues to grind through bureaucratic delays, a similar program targeting the small-time landlords who have long dominated the New Orleans rental market hasn't paid anyone and won't for months to come, reports The Times-Picayune. Landlords owning properties with one to four rental units ultimately will be able to tap into $869 million in rebuilding grants, less than an eighth of the $7.5 billion devoted to help owners of damaged homes through the Road Home program, which to date has paid only about 100 of more than 90,000 applicants. And the Louisiana rental property aid program will be managed by the same cast of officials: the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, the state Office of Community Development and privately contracted manager ICF International.
December 13, 2006
The leader of a nonpartisan Mississippi watchdog group is urging state ethics commissioners to decide whether three legislators are breaking the law by profiting from a contract that allows them to finalize grants for Hurricane Katrina victims. The Mississippi Press reports that Dick Johnson, president of the Mississippi affiliate of Common Cause, also says ethics commissioners should tell the public about the results of their investigation.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is asking FEMA to add another year to the time thousands of Mississippians will be allowed to live in trailers the government issued after Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that Barbour says a shortage of permanent housing makes it impossible for most people living in FEMA trailers to move out before the current deadline of Feb. 28. Mississippi Emergency Management Agency records show that as of Monday, 84,494 people were living in FEMA trailers in 13 Mississippi counties — 31,294 trailers multiplied by the average family size of 2.7 people.
December 7, 2006
The U.S. Government Accountability Office's Web site has been updated to include its Dec. 6 report presented to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on fraud and waste in FEMA's hurricane relief efforts.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita Disaster Relief: Continued Findings of Fraud, Waste, and Abuse
December 6, 2006
FEMA said Tuesday that it will appeal a judge's order that the agency resume housing assistance and make retroactive payments to thousands of hurricane evacuees, according to the Houston Chronicle. The appeal notice came just hours after lawyers for evacuees asked a federal judge in Washington to order FEMA to provide a plan for compliance with the Nov. 29 order. FEMA's notice did not specify grounds for the appeal.
More than a year after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, life is still precarious and unpredictable for many evacuees, especially those who have depended on the government for a modicum of stability, reports The New York Times. About 102,000 families are still living in government trailers scattered around the region, and an additional 33,000 are living in apartments paid for by FEMA. What trauma victims need most, stability, is just what has proved most elusive.
December 5, 2006
A Louisiana State Police employee and 11 others have been arrested in connection with the theft of 256 computers purchased by federal authorities after Hurricane Katrina to replace storm-damaged computers at government buildings, hospitals and other facilities, according to The Associated Press. Only 43 of the stolen Dell computers, valued at about $900 each, had been recovered as of Monday morning, police said.
December 4, 2006
A government watchdog agency is looking into two hurricane-related contracts awarded to Clearbrook LLC, a water services company based in Mobile, Ala., and expects to issue its findings and recommendations next month, a Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman said. The investigation is being conducted by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, FEMA's parent agency, according to spokesman James McIntyre. Late last year, the inspector general reported finding evidence of more than $3 million in overbillings on a Clearbrook contract worth up to $80.6 million to provide food and lodging to emergency responders, reports The Press-Register.
December 1, 2006
The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency says he was disappointed that a judge, in a sharply critical ruling, ordered the agency to resume housing aid to thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees. "It's almost a thing of no good deed goes unpunished," Director R. David Paulison told reporters at the National Press Club. "We felt like we did a good job." The Houston Chronicle reports that a federal judge on Wednesday ordered the federal government to resume paying rent and make three months of retroactive payments for about 2,600 hurricane evacuee households in Houston and thousands more across the country.
November 27, 2006
Nearly 15 months after the hurricane, the number of Katrina victims spending Thanksgiving in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency this year is paradoxically greater — roughly three times greater — than it was last year, reports the Associated Press. The reason: Many people who were living with family members or staying in hotels at government expense last year have since moved out or been evicted. But they have been unable to return to their homes because they are still waiting for their houses to be repaired, their insurance to come through, or water and electricity to be turned back on — or they have yet to decide whether to rebuild at all.
November 16, 2006
New Orleans' City Park was once a lush Southern landscape of lazy lagoons, majestic ancient oaks draped with Spanish moss, and magnolias framing the fairways of three golf courses. That was before Hurricane Katrina swamped nearly all of it with up to 8 feet of water. Most of the grass in New Orleans' biggest park died, along with more than a thousand trees, reports The Associated Press. But the 1,300-acre park, one-third larger than New York's Central Park, is slowly coming back, with the help of volunteers, private donations from around the world and a major gift from New Orleans Saints star Reggie Bush. Still, the job ahead is huge, and park officials estimate complete restoration will cost $43 million.
November 14, 2006
Dillard University in New Orleans is receiving $2 million from the federal government to rebuild off-campus housing damaged by Hurricane Katrina, according to The Associated Press. The grant announced Monday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development comes under a program meant to help historically black colleges and universities, such as Dillard, further address the needs of their communities. Katrina left the private school's campus under up to 8 feet of water, some of which stayed in buildings for several weeks, said Karen Celestan, Dillard's senior director for university communications. Since the storm, just one of Dillard's dorms has re-opened, and it has limited space for co-eds, she said.
November 1, 2006
Two dozen damaged streetcars will be rebuilt and more than 200 flooded city buses will be replaced thanks to $43 million in post-Katrina funding that the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Tuesday for the Regional Transit Authority of New Orleans. Jim Stark, director of FEMA's Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office, said half of the money will be used to rebuild the fleet of 24 red Canal Street streetcars heavily flooded at RTA's headquarters in Mid City, according to The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The remainder will be used to replace the 200-plus buses that sat in more than 5 feet of water for several weeks after the storm, Stark said.
October 24, 2006
In an effort to fully account for those killed by Katrina, researchers at the Earth Institute at Columbia University are compiling an online list of all Gulf Coast residents who died as a result of the hurricane. John Mutter, deputy director of institute, said the project's goal is to identify all of those who died from both direct and indirect effects of the storm, as well as due to social standing or decisions made by policy makers. According to the article posted on the institute's Web site, more than 1,250 names have been collected to date by reviewing obituaries and coroners' lists, then following up with calls to family members, churches and social service organizations to build a more comprehensive picture of each victim.
October 23, 2006
The Associated Press reports that the nation's five Gulf Coast states are competing for a pool of $400 million to test and build alternative housing for hurricane victims, a pilot program FEMA hopes can become a model for how to provide fast, temporary or semi-permanent housing after the next tornado in Nebraska, earthquake in Hawaii or hurricane in Louisiana.
October 20, 2006
A Louisiana state panel endorsed plans Thursday to offer health care to everyone in Hurricane Katrina-devastated greater New Orleans — amid warnings that without more federal aid soon, few doctors and nurses might be left to deliver the care, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The Louisiana Health Care Redesign Collaborative ratified a 67-page document laying out its vision for universal access and managed care. No one on the panel voted against sending the plan to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt so that talks on a final agreement can begin between federal and state government officials. Leavitt wants to use federal aid for the poor, which has largely gone to the state-run charity hospital system, to purchase private insurance for the uninsured.
Throughout southeast Louisiana, owners of 460 camps and homes on water in places such as Bayou Segnette, the Wagon Wheel and parts of Chalmette have received contracts from Entergy Louisiana asking them to pay a portion of the $24 million it will cost to restore power to their sites in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according to The Times-Picayune. While the $2,600-a-month example is extreme, others are being asked to pay several hundred dollars extra each month.
October 19, 2006
U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., is locking horns with President Bush because he struck a provision that would have required the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to have emergency preparedness management experience, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Landrieu sent a letter to Bush, saying the Senate in recent legislation intended to "protect against further mistakes such as those that plagued the 2005 hurricane response." Last year, former FEMA head Michael Brown was removed from the job for his handling of Hurricane Katrina; he had no real emergency preparedness experience when he joined the agency.
October 6, 2006
Wholesale destruction of most New Orleans neighborhoods raises the specter of historically significant homes and buildings facing the wrecking ball. But identifying such structures has proven a tall order for preservation specialists hired by the federal government, reports The Times-Picayune. The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week alerted the public through a newspaper advertisement to a list of 505 homes in New Orleans that owners have asked to be torn down using federal grant money. The appeal, meant to get the public to help identify historic buildings, will be used to determine whether any of the homes would be eligible for listing on the National Register of Historical Places, a test required when federal money is used for demolitions.
October 5, 2006
Louisiana will use $38 million in federal funds to train workers for jobs in high demand after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Gov. Kathleen Blanco said Wednesday. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that the money is part of the $10.4 billion in federal aid, called community development block grants, that Louisiana has landed since the storms of 2005. The funds will be used to train workers for jobs in health care, transportation, construction, advanced manufacturing, oil and gas and the cultural sector, such as music and book stores, performing arts and spectator sports.
October 4, 2006
Almost three-fourths of New Orleans homeowners applying for federal grants say they will use the money to rebuild their flood-ruined properties rather than take a buyout or relocate, a figure that far surpasses the state average of about 56 percent and may signal the potent recovery the city. The Times-Picayune reports that the data, released Tuesday in the most detailed report so far of the intentions of homeowners who have applied to the state's $7.5 billion Road Home program, suggest the potential for the widespread rebirth of New Orleans, even as blight continues to pervade neighborhoods 13 months after the flood, the top official of the Louisiana Recovery Authority said. While the news of homeowners' return to New Orleans seems positive, nowhere do the numbers seem bleaker than in suburban St. Bernard Parish. So far, only 37 percent of parish residents who have applied for grants said they planned to rebuild their houses where they stood before the storm. (See Government Data for link to statistics.)
September 27, 2006
Five Detroit area women, an Indiana man and a Mississippi woman fraudulently obtained nearly $30,000 in relief money intended for Hurricane Katrina victims and used the cash to buy cars, narcotics and other items, the federal government alleged in criminal complaints filed Tuesday. The government alleges that none of them had been directly affected by the Aug. 29, 2005 storm that slammed the Gulf Coast, The Detroit News reports. But each obtained between $2,000 and $12,750 in Federal Emergency Management Agency aid, mainly by falsely claiming they lived in New Orleans when the storm hit, according to complaints filed in U.S. District Court.
September 22, 2006
A south Alabama woman pleaded guilty to bilking the federal government out of $277,377 in Hurricane Katrina disaster relief funds. Lawanda Trena Williams, 32, pleaded guilty to making false claims to the government, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, reports The Associated Press. Williams claimed Katrina damages in 30 separate cases, used false Social Security numbers and various names and addresses in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida to receive thousands of dollars in aid, according to prosecutors.
September 21, 2006
Congress ordered the nation's disaster planners Wednesday to make sure that pets don't get left behind in the next catastrophe. Reacting to reports of Hurricane Katrina victims refusing to leave New Orleans without their dogs, cats and birds, Congress passed legislation requiring state and local governments to draw up plans for evacuating and sheltering pets in a disaster, reports The Times-Picayune. The legislation, which received final congressional approval Wednesday, also gave FEMA the authority to finance shelter renovations to house pets on a temporary basis.
September 18, 2006
Maryland State Police say a woman scammed a church, nonprofit organizations and individual donors on Maryland's lower Eastern Shore out of thousands of dollars by making up a story about her children dying during Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that police said 45-year-old Sandra Sue Suiter was arrested last week on suspicion of fraud. Suiter is accused of trying to solicit, and in some cases receiving, charitable donations after claiming that her 3-year-old twins were killed in Slidell, La., during Katrina, investigators said.
September 13, 2006
The Louisiana Family Assistance Center, the government effort cobbled together to handle reports of missing residents scattered by Katrina and Rita, resolved more than 99 percent of the cases, according to its final report. The Associated Press reports that emergency response planners hope technology will reduce the need for such massive efforts in the future. Hurricane Katrina displaced an estimated 1.4 million residents of New Orleans and nearby parishes. But because many were sheltered in areas close to where Rita hit weeks later, some were evacuated a second time. The result was 13,200 cases of people reported missing. (For report link, see Government Data listings.)
September 8, 2006
State and federal criminal justice officials united in delivering a message Thursday that they will show "zero tolerance" for illegal abuses of Louisiana's Road Home home-rebuilding grant program and that thumbprint identifications will be taken for all applicants to help stem fraud. The Times-Picayune reports that the approach is a collaborative effort among federal and state officials that encourages citizens to report fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement of money from the federally financed $10 billion pool. State Attorney General Charles Foti said the dishonest practices targeted by the measure include contractors defrauding homeowners or dishonest homeowners filing false claims for assistance.
Notices have been posted on 3,025 New Orleans buildings that have not been gutted since Hurricane Katrina or otherwise violate the city's blighted property laws, officials said Thursday in explaining how they have begun to enforce the Aug. 29 deadline set by the City Council for owners to clean up flood-damaged houses and commercial buildings. The Times-Picayune reports that the postings in two of five districts are the first in the city's effort to deal with the tens of thousands of blighted properties. Formal notification letters have been mailed to only about 100 owners; before sending them officials must determine the last known legal address for an owner and check to see whether the owner has applied for a demolition or construction permit for the site. Donna Addkison, the director of planning and development, said the city expects to send out 50 to 100 letters a day indefinitely.
Houston may be hot, unfriendly and frustratingly difficult to navigate, but more than two-thirds of the poorest New Orleans evacuees who fled to the city after Hurricane Katrina plan to stay, a Rice University survey released today shows. Almost 69 percent of the 1,081 people queried in the National Science Foundation-funded study conducted in July by political science professors Rick Wilson and Robert Stein said they likely will remain in Houston, according to the Houston Chronicle. Wilson and Stein say their findings reflect the view of 35,000 to 40,000 evacuees, about one-fourth of the displaced New Orleanians thought to be living in the city.
September 6, 2006
The greatest U.S. cultural disaster, as the National Trust for Historic Preservation describes Hurricane Katrina, claimed a huge chunk of the Mississippi Coast's landmark identity. Venerable live oaks, charming waterfront neighborhoods and an architecture that reflected several centuries disappeared or were badly damaged and remain fragile a year later, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. Some landmarks remain — the Biloxi Lighthouse, Pascagoula's Old Spanish Fort, the Friendship Oak in Long Beach and the Hancock Bank in Bay St. Louis are standouts among them — but need repairs.
August 31, 2006
Katrina fatigue erupted into anger and frustration Wednesday night, as more than 1,700 residents urged Mayor Bill White to send evacuees home to New Orleans. The Houston Chronicle reports that one year after the city of Houston welcomed at least 250,000 evacuees, more than 100,000 New Orleans natives still remain. West Houston residents who gathered Wednesday at Grace Presbyterian Church to address increases in violent crime over the past year in their community said evacuees are to blame.
August 28, 2006
Across New Orleans, the buzz of saws and the whine of sanders can be heard almost everywhere, from upper middle class Lakeview to the ravaged Lower 9th Ward. By June 29, more than 56,000 property owners had taken out some sort of permit from City Hall, more than one permit for every three structures in the city, reports The Times-Picayune. Having a permit, of course, is not the same as acting on it. Untold thousands of homeowners snared permits before they were ready to start work for any number of reasons — because they didn't know how long City Hall would give them out for free, because they wanted to be grandfathered in before new elevation standards were adopted to reduce the threat of flood damage, because they were afraid inaction would be used as an excuse for officials to seize their homes.
August 21, 2006
Nearly one year after Hurricane Katrina punched into the Gulf Coast, much damage remains, both in the shattered homes that litter parts of New Orleans and in the battered reputation of government institutions. The Washington Post reports that in the heart of a new hurricane season, many Americans are not persuaded by federal officials' assurances that the government is ready for the next big storm. A national poll conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that fewer than half of those surveyed said they thought the government is "very prepared" to deal with this year's hurricane season. Only half agreed that the federal government had "learned a lesson from Hurricane Katrina."
August 18, 2006
Frail elderly residents who were evacuated from nursing homes in Gulf Coast states suffered more than the vast majority of those who were not moved during last year's hurricanes, according to a report to be issued today by the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. The report is based on site visits and interviews with administrators and staff members at 20 nursing homes in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, all with emergency plans that meet the requirements of federal and state law. But it found that the plans had many deficiencies, especially in ensuring the safe and comfortable evacuation of residents with complex needs, reports The New York Times.
August 10, 2006
New Orleanians seeking help with cleaning and gutting their flood-damaged homes by the Aug. 29 deadline set by the city can contact more than a dozen nonprofit organizations that offer free gutting, according to a list posted on the city's Web site. Officials said last week that the city will not take any action against homeowners who have shown an intention to fix up their homes. The City Council voted in April to set Aug. 29 as the deadline for property owners to clean, gut and board up damaged homes, The Times-Picayune reports. If the owners miss the deadline, the council's ordinance says, the city can declare their properties to be "public nuisances" subject to "repair, rehabilitation, demolition or removal."
August 2, 2006
Over the past several months, psychiatrist James Barbee has witnessed a disturbing trend among his patients in New Orleans — a noticeable slide from post-Katrina anxiety into more serious clinical depression. Nearly one year after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast frustration over the slow pace of recovery is taking a toll on the region's overall mental health. Initially, complaints reflected what some locals have dubbed "Katrina Brain": general fatigue brought on by the disruption of their lives, difficulty concentrating, mood swings and mild depression. In most cases, it was nothing that reached critical levels, according to Time. But since the first of the year, Barbee says, "there's been a steady increase in depression, specifically major depression."
July 27, 2006
When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast last year, it revealed serious shortcomings in nursing homes' evacuation plans, reports the Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch. A year after the disaster, flaws in emergency plans still have not been fixed according to "Disaster Preparedness: Limitations in Federal Evacuation Assistance for Health Facilities Should be Addressed," a report released the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found that facility administrators faced several challenges, including deciding whether to evacuate, obtaining needed transportation and maintaining outside communication. The GAO also found that the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Plan — the basic framework for how the federal government helps states and local governments during disasters — fails to address the evacuation of nursing home residents.
See Gulf Coast Reconstruction Watch article
July 24, 2006
To the list of daily aggravations in the new New Orleans, add one that augments the heat, spoils the food and drains the cash register: power failures. Ten months after Hurricane Katrina, the city still does not have a reliable electrical system, reports The New York Times. Hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of repairs are still needed on a system devastated by flooding, the local utility is in bankruptcy and less than half of pre-storm customers have returned. Entergy New Orleans wants to increase its rates 25 percent to help pay for part of what it says is $718 million in storm losses and revenue shortfalls. That would increase the average household bill by $45 a month.
July 11, 2006
Accompanied by a warning that protecting New Orleans and the Louisiana coast from major hurricanes would cost "double-digit billions of dollars" and take decades to accomplish, the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers on Monday submitted to Congress an interim protection report that includes no recommendations for specific projects. The decision to leave individual projects out of the interim Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration report in favor of language on how future projects would be chosen was immediately criticized by high-ranking officials from the state, reports The Times-Picayune. Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana asked Sen. Pete Domenici, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Energy and Water, for a hearing to investigate why the administration changed the report that was being agreed to by local corps officials and the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Kathleen Blanco demanded that the corps submit to Congress the five major projects recommended by the state for initial authorization. (Report link under Government Data)
July 7, 2006
The Louisiana Recovery Authority on Thursday allocated $500 million in block grant money to help leverage billions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure torn up by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Most of the money will be matched to Federal Emergency Management Agency repair money. The LRA move will ensure that billions will be spent on repairing water treatment systems, port facilities, airports, highways and public schools. But use of the money faces a hurdle in parishes that have not yet adopted recommended flood-elevation standards advised by FEMA, according to The Times-Picayune. FEMA expects strict compliance with the advisories, and LRA officials generally back the standard, said LRA Executive Director Andy Kopplin.
The New Orleans City Council on Thursday asked the Louisiana Recovery Authority and FEMA for hard and fast deadlines on when it must adopt federal advisory flood maps, as well as for clarification of how its vote would affect homeowners' ability to buy flood insurance and receive federal rebuilding grants. The request was another nudge in the ongoing scrap between city, state and federal officials over how the flow of federal aid through the LRA's Road Home program could be hampered if local governments refuse to fold the "advisory base flood elevation" maps into their building codes, reports The Times-Picayune.
July 6, 2006
With the verified sexual-assault count among Hurricane Katrina evacuees nearing 70, police and women's advocates in the Gulf Coast area say the risk of violence against evacuee children and women is intensified by crowded, temporary housing 10 months after the storm. Lt. David Benelli, commander of the New Orleans Police Department Sex Crimes Unit, said sex-assault charges against people who are not strangers to their accusers are mounting. In January, the Louisiana Foundation Against Sexual Assault asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a list of Katrina evacuees so it could urge those witnessing or suffering sexual violence to contact them for help, but director Judy Benitez said FEMA sent a form letter denying the request, Women's eNews reports.
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco will announce today a $200 million restoration of Jackson Barracks, a project expected spur redevelopment in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and Arabi areas, as well as enabling the Louisiana National Guard to return its state headquarters to the complex. The huge repair project, which will be in accordance with FEMA guidelines, will demonstrate to property owners how to repair shattered homes and build new ones according to new hurricane codes, Blanco said. The 100-acre historic base took on between 4 feet and 8 feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The flooding forced the Louisiana National Guard to temporarily move its state headquarters to Camp Beauregard, near Pineville.
June 30, 2006
The government will keep covering the full cost of clearing the bulk of Hurricane Katrina wreckage in the Gulf Coast for the rest of the year, the White House said Thursday. A program that reimburses states and cities for all their bills was to end June 30, reports The Associated Press. That would have shifted 10 percent of the cost away from Washington. An estimated 20 million cubic yards of wreckage still litters New Orleans and Mississippi waterways, according to the most recent Federal Emergency Management Agency data available.
June 26, 2006
Ten months after Hurricane Katrina exposed failures at all levels of government, Congress is seeking to avert another debacle the next time the country faces a catastrophic natural disaster or terrorist attack — and its focus is the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The public debate has centered on calls to take FEMA out of the Department of Homeland Security and allow it to again report directly to the president, reports The Washington Post. The White House opposes such a move. Experts say the argument obscures older, deeper problems that undermine the nation's preparedness.
June 16, 2006
With the U.S. Senate and President Bush giving final approval to billions of dollars in federal spending for hurricane recovery in Louisiana, officials said they will launch new outreach efforts to sign up homeowners who haven't yet registered for the state's Road Home housing program and hope to begin issuing checks by midsummer. The Times-Picayune reports that money in the emergency supplemental spending bill will help finance the program, which is designed to reimburse homeowners as much as $150,000 for their uninsured, uncompensated damages to repair, rebuild or relocate.
In the six months after Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid about $26,000 in relief funds to 10 applicants who used the names and Social Security numbers of inmates in the Alabama prison system, according to a top official with the Government Accountability Office. The payments, made under a program that provides post-disaster help to individuals and families, were among millions of dollars spent on claims filed in the names of more than 1,000 state and federal prisoners throughout the Gulf Coast region, according to the Press-Register.
June 14, 2006
The government doled out as much as $1.4 billion in bogus assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and was hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and even a divorce lawyer, congressional investigators have found. In the Government Accountability Office's report, prison inmates, a supposed victim who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address, and a person who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel were able to wrongly get taxpayer help, according to The Associated Press.
June 12, 2006
Calling it a lesson learned from Hurricane Katrina, the House Financial Services Housing Subcommittee has approved a bill designating the Department of Housing and Urban Development as the lead agency for handling long-term housing needs resulting from major disasters, according to CongressDaily. The bill makes several other changes to federal disaster-declaration law aimed at easing the Gulf Coast's recovery from Katrina, such as allowing only three trailers per site after a disaster to avoid crowded trailer parks like those set up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and allowing disaster victims to decline a trailer without losing eligibility for other assistance.
June 8, 2006
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is telling local leaders June 30 will be the last day they will remove Hurricane Katrina-related debris in pummeled Hancock County, though officials say the job is far from over, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. John Martin, a corps debris specialist, told Bay St. Louis, Waveland and county officials to begin making plans to take over the job once the agency quits.
June 5, 2006
Days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Louisiana/Mississippi border, it became clear that people with disabilities were having trouble getting help. Census figures indicate that more than 20 percent of the population affected by Hurricane Katrina had some type of disability, according to National Journal. As people flowed out of New Orleans last August, complaints began flowing in from those with disabilities who were poorly served during the evacuation.
Seven months after authorities began investigating allegations that Louisiana law-enforcement officers might have gotten disaster benefits for Hurricane Katrina to which they weren't entitled, there have been no arrests or exonerations. Federal agents took over the investigation the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office started and the Baton Rouge Police Department joined in October, according to The (Baton Rogue) Advocate. The probe was prompted in part by a Baton Rouge Union of Police Local 237 memorandum, disseminated via Police Department e-mail, in September encouraging its members to apply for hurricane benefits from the American Red Cross "whether you sustained a loss or not" and refers to financial assistance debit cards for Hurricane Katrina victims as "gift cards," and insists they were a special benefit for union members.
May 31, 2006
A Houston federal judge refused Tuesday to order federal officials to continue an emergency housing program for Hurricane Katrina evacuees nationwide until June 30. The decision by U.S. District Judge David Hittner means that more than 2,000 evacuees will lose their housing assistance Thursday, according to the Houston Chronicle. The Houston law firm Caddell & Chapman is representing the plaintiffs and had sought a temporary restraining order — effective for a maximum of 20 days — to give evacuees more time in FEMA's emergency program while the court considers the plaintiffs' request for long-term relief.
Thursday is the start of the new hurricane season. It also is the day the Federal Emergency Management Agency will begin dismantling camps that have housed and fed 40,000 volunteers who came to Louisiana to help salvage blighted areas in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita, Newhouse News Service reports. FEMA previously had said it would tear down its last four Louisiana camps in April, but it extended the deadline when local officials and charities pleaded for more time so the volunteers would have a place to stay. FEMA will continue to fund housing assistance programs and public rebuilding projects, but local officials and charities say closing the camps now threatens the region's recovery by taking away the only conveniences the depressed areas can offer volunteers: a place to stay and decent meals.
See Newhouse News Service article
May 30, 2006
Mississippi is withholding nearly $17 million in federal reimbursement money from its most populous coastal county while authorities probe a "multitude of discrepancies" in bills that contractors submitted for Hurricane Katrina debris removal, according to officials and documents reviewed by The Associated Press. The state stopped making payments last month to Harrison County — which contains Biloxi and Gulfport — after the Federal Emergency Management Agency began auditing the work being done to clear away storm-damaged trees. An internal FEMA report faulted county officials for paying the contractors more than $10 million without checking the work's quality or accuracy. After FEMA officials inspected more than a dozen of the roads where work was performed, its debris specialists notified the county on three occasions that the contractors were "not performing their jobs properly resulting in ineligible limbs and trees being cut and billed."
About 55,000 families displaced by Hurricane Katrina face the end of a federally funded rental assistance program, in which local governments issued 12-month housing and utility vouchers. Last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency began issuing letters to thousands of evacuees telling them their aid would be terminated. The vouchers are to end Wednesday in most of the country, reports The Washington Post. That decision, says a class-action lawsuit filed by the Houston law firm of Caddell & Chapman and a consortium of public interest law groups, will create "widespread homelessness" and violates FEMA's statutory obligations to provide temporary housing assistance to hurricane victims. Sixty-two members of the House filed a brief last week supporting the suit. It says that FEMA "continues to engage in a process that is marked by inefficiency, a lack of discernable standards and seeming disregard for the plight of the vulnerable survivors who are depending on the aid that FEMA is statutorily obligated to provide."
May 25, 2006
For tens of thousands of Gulf Coast homeowners, rebuilding can't start without a few crucial pieces of paper. Nearly every form of post-Katrina aid requires copies of records such as deeds, insurance policies, mortgages, federal tax liens and military discharges, according to The Associated Press. Before storm victims could seek help, officials in some of the hardest-hit parts of Louisiana and Mississippi had to salvage millions of records that Katrina soaked when it flooded courthouses and offices.
May 24, 2006
Concerned that vital flood-control and hurricane protection work will be stalled because of failure to pass a water bill that includes the projects, all seven members of Louisiana’s House delegation introduced federal legislation Tuesday that would authorize what they describe as critical projects in Louisiana. Louisiana lawmakers complain that they are sometimes put in a Catch-22 situation, as colleagues in Congress tell them that their proposed projects have merit but can't move without authorization. Authorization, in many cases, has been delayed because Congress is now four years late in passing a new Water Resources Development Act, which authorizes key national Army Corps of Engineers projects, according to The Times-Picayune.
May 22, 2006
New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin was re-elected Saturday in what many considered an improbable victory, overcoming a ceaseless barrage of criticism stemming from the chaos of Hurricane Katrina and the stalled recovery. The Washington Post reports that in addition to the frustrations of post-hurricane New Orleans, Nagin had to fend off a strong challenge by Louisiana Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, the scion of a politically powerful clan, who outspent him by large a margin. Surrounded by throngs of cheering supporters, Nagin acknowledged the antagonism he has aroused since Katrina and, to the surprise of many in the room, thanked President Bush. He cited the billions of dollars for housing and levee construction that Bush has supported, and then urged unity: "This election is over, and it is time for this community to start the healing process."
Three thousand families in Mississippi have been deemed ineligible for a trailer as Federal Emergency Management Agency weeds out those Katrina victims who do not meet the qualifications for its emergency housing program, according to the Los Angeles Times. About 450 households have received eviction letters from FEMA; the rest are scheduled to receive notices in the next few weeks. Mississippi has 38,000 FEMA trailers. The reasons for the evictions are varied, and many are legitimate. There are trailer dwellers who could not prove they are legal U.S. residents; people who had owned a second, undamaged home all along; and people whose homes were damaged, but not by Katrina. But a number of residents said they were being kicked out erroneously, or for technicalities that arise from gray areas in FEMA regulations.
Many Houston students who are Katrina evacuees are failing the Texas competency tests, according to National Public Radio. Two-thirds of them failed the state math achievement test. They face being held back or going to summer school. The school system is getting about $16 million to pay for educating the Katrina evacuees, but that doesn't cover summer school costs.
Hear National Public Radio report
May 19, 2006
Six Hurricane Katrina evacuees will ask a judge to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency to continue housing assistance for thousands of evacuees threatened with loss of benefits and potential homelessness, according to the Houston Chronicle. A class action lawsuit, expected to be filed today in federal court in Houston, says FEMA's response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita has been "wholly inept." It echoes complaints by housing advocates, city officials and others that the agency has unlawfully disqualified thousands of evacuees from its housing programs and has provided confusing and contradictory information. At the heart of the case is FEMA's decision to shift evacuees from a locally administered voucher program, which pays rent and utilities, to an individual assistance program that pays only rent and has stricter eligibility requirements.
Hurricane Katrina destroyed at least 250 historic buildings and severely damaged just as many in Mississippi, said Jennifer Baughn of the state Department of Archives and History. Baughn, a historical architect, said there's no telling how much it could cost to restore buildings and sites. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Thad Cochran, a Republican from Mississippi, has included $80 million to restore storm-damaged historic sites in a $27 billion emergency hurricane package pending in Congress, The Clarion-Ledger reports. The Federal Emergency Management Agency pays up to 90 percent of the total cost to repair public sites, including schools and courthouses. But that leaves state and local municipalities, many of which were financially wiped out, to pick up the remaining cost, which could add up to millions of dollars, Baughn said.
May 18, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is installing a new tracking system to make sure that emergency supplies go where they're supposed to go as it prepares for hurricane season, reports National Public Radio. Officials hope to improve communications equipment and better equip search-and-rescue teams. Much of the activity is taking place at FEMA's logistics center in Fort Worth, Texas, which provided emergency supplies for much of the Gulf Coast region.
Hear National Public Radio report
May 16, 2006
A group of banks led by JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed Monday to extend New Orleans a $150 million line of credit over three years, helping shore up city finances ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, The Associated Press reports. Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who is up for re-election on Saturday, said the money will be used primarily to ensure city services are maintained and to eliminate the threat of municipal bankruptcy. The city will have three years to repay the debt and anticipates being able to do so out of regular revenue, Nagin said.
May 12, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a video network to allow officials in Washington, D.C., to assess live feed of disasters and has equipped trucks with GPS devices so the agency can see when supplies are delivered to stricken areas, officials said Thursday. To better prepare for this year's hurricane season, FEMA has also stockpiled equipment for floods and started a partnership with the Coast Guard to use its boats when responding to some emergencies, reports The Associated Press. FEMA plans to reduce delays by sending relief supplies before a storm hits to cities close to the expected damage area, including generators and search-and-rescue and medical teams, said Ron Cooper, who supervises six of FEMA's nine logistics centers nationwide.
May 11, 2006
Louisiana lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to Gov. Kathleen Blanco's $7.5 billion aid program for people whose homes were heavily damaged by Katrina and Rita, but checks can't go out until Washington officials weigh in. The Associated Press reports that Blanco needs approval from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for the program, and the plans depend on $4.2 billion in federal aid pending in Congress. The housing program would spend federal recovery dollars on repairs, rebuilding and buyouts for homeowners. Homeowners aren't expected to see any grants until at least late summer. Homeowners must have uninsured hurricane damage of more than $5,200 — an estimated 123,000 people are expected to be eligible.
A coalition of advocates for displaced New Orleans residents called on the city's mayoral candidates Wednesday to speak up for thousands of families in Houston and elsewhere who are about to lose Federal Emergency Management Agency rental assistance, and perhaps their apartments, according to The Times-Picayune. A FEMA spokesman in Austin confirmed that about 7,000 of the 36,000 New Orleans area families now living in Houston might lose rental vouchers because they do not qualify for a longer-term federal assistance program with tougher eligibility requirements. Local families displaced to other states after Hurricane Katrina are in a similar bind, although national numbers were not available. The news distressed local housing advocates for the poor, who said they worry that New Orleans tenants evicted in Houston may try to make their way back home, where there is little to no affordable housing for them.
Workers on Wednesday began tearing down thousands of condemned homes in St. Bernard Parish, a blue-collar territory adjacent to New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina spared only a few structures, reports The Associated Press. The federally funded demolitions are being carried out by the parish government. Owners of condemned homes who want to take advantage of the demolition have until May 31. Charlie Reppel, a special assistant to the parish president, said he believes about 8,000 homes will be demolished, although that number could rise. There are about 26,000 homes in the parish. Only about 20,000 of the pre-Katrina population of about 67,000 have returned.
May 10, 2006
Northrop Grumman's top shipbuilding executive on Tuesday defended asking for emergency supplemental appropriations to pay for ship repairs at the firm's Gulf Coast yards damaged by Hurricane Katrina, arguing that failure to do so would have serious repercussions for several Navy projects. If Congress does not appropriate the money, ship production could be delayed as long as a year, potentially driving up costs by as much as $500 million, Philip Teel, president of Northrop Grumman's Ship Systems business, told reporters at a news conference. The company estimates the storm caused $2.35 billion in ship and infrastructure damages at its Gulf Coast facilities, CongressDaily reports. Of that, Northrop Grumman would like to tap $200 million out of up to $2.7 billion in appropriated funds for the Navy for Katrina-related damage. But critics say the money amounts to corporate welfare and a bailout for one of the country's top defense contractors that could ultimately reach $500 million.
May 9, 2006
The Louisiana Health Department cleared the way Monday for people to begin to return to the New Orleans neighborhood that faced Hurricane Katrina's worst fury, saying tap water in part of the Lower Ninth Ward is safe. The area where tap water was declared safe encompasses the 10 blocks or so closest to the Mississippi River, where the ground is higher, reports The Associated Press. In other parts of the neighborhood, people still must boil water before using it to drink, prepare food or bathe, Mayor C. Ray Nagin noted. Officials said they do not know when they'll be able to open those areas.
May 8, 2006
Hurricane Katrina evacuees deemed ineligible for further housing assistance will be allowed to remain in the city of Houston's voucher program an extra month, city officials said Friday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency extended the deadline from June 1 to June 30, the Houston Chronicle reports. Meanwhile, FEMA staff continues to review the cases of about 8,900 heads of household the agency deemed ineligible for the individual assistance program that is replacing the city-sponsored voucher program.
May 5, 2006
The Pentagon's homeland-defense branch pledged major improvement Thursday in readiness, resources and response speed to help with catastrophic hurricanes this year, according to USA TODAY. New procedures are in place so disaster assistance can be requested and sent days quicker than in last year's response to Hurricane Katrina, said Adm. Tim Keating, commander of the U.S. Northern Command. The help ranges from damage assessment, mass feeding and air support to fuel distribution, medical evacuation and route clearing. In addition, NorthCom officers are permanently assigned at the 10 regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The daily presence at FEMA is to create familiarity so disaster response isn't caught in bureaucratic delays, Col. Stover James said.
May 4, 2006
New Orleans city council members grilled a FEMA official Wednesday, insisting they have done everything in their power to push the city's recovery forward while battling the agency’s bureaucracy and closeted planning of Mayor C. Ray Nagin. For more than an hour, Mark Misczak, who identified himself as a "human services branch director" for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fielded questions, The Times Picayune reports. The queries initially focused on housing issues, but eventually morphed into a litany of complaints on issues ranging from the exclusion of local companies from FEMA contracts and the slow pace of Entergy repairs to the precarious position that people still living in trailers will be in this hurricane season. Citing reports that FEMA was closing its long-range planning office in New Orleans because neither the city nor the state could create a timely recovery plan, council members railed against the agency for deserting desperate citizens. However, Misczak said that was not the case and that perhaps confusion arose over location, not intent; FEMA is not shuttering its New Orleans operation, he said, but is simply moving a small piece of it under another roof.
The neediest of Hurricane Katrina survivors will receive unprecedented help through a long-term Salvation Army plan and a $155 million donation for related services, reports The (Biloxi) Sun Herald. The Salvation Army unveiled its recovery and rebuilding plan Wednesday at Biloxi’s Yankie Stadium. The services, for Katrina survivors in Mississippi and Louisiana only, include emergency relief for local Salvation Army centers, homeownership grants of up to $10,000, job-training services and a fund for unmet community needs.
May 3, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is closing its long-term recovery office in New Orleans, claiming local officials failed to meet their planning obligations after Hurricane Katrina, reports The Associated Press. The office is responsible for helping the city devise a blueprint to rebuild destroyed houses, schools and neighborhoods. "FEMA cannot drive the planning — our mission is to support it. We can only do so much and then we look to the city to embrace and begin planning and managing," said FEMA's national spokesman Aaron Walker. "Once they begin planning, we can re-engage with them."
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff said Tuesday he is "very confident" that federal officials are ready for the upcoming hurricane season, reports The Associated Press. In a letter sent Monday to Chertoff, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., demanded specifics on staffing of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to ensure that enough experienced workers are on hand by the official June 1 start of the hurricane season. The agency will at least come close to its goal of filling 95 percent of its vacancies by then, Chertoff said.
May 2, 2006
The nation of Qatar plans to announce today roughly $60 million in grants to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina, including $17.5 million to Xavier University of Louisiana, the only historically black Catholic university in the United States. Other beneficiaries are to be Tulane University, Children's Hospital in New Orleans, Habitat for Humanity, Louisiana State University and the March of Dimes, The New York Times reports. Nasser Bin Hamad M. al-Khalifa, Qatar's ambassador to the United States, said the remainder of the $100 million his country had pledged would be assigned in the coming months.
May 1, 2006
Eight months after Hurricane Katrina flattened the Gulf Coast region and displaced about 372,000 students, school officials say restrictions on how they can spend federal relief money are slowing down their efforts to rebuild and reopen schools, reports USA TODAY. A few lawmakers say the effort should be stripped from the Federal Emergency Management Agency altogether and handed to a proposed "education recovery czar" at the U.S. Education Department. In many cases, superintendents have started rebuilding efforts on their own, crossing their fingers that federal aid would follow.
April 28, 2006
Surrounded by evidence of the incomplete recovery from Hurricane Katrina, President Bush on Thursday tried to calm fears across the Gulf Coast that another monster storm could be lurking in the upcoming hurricane season. "We pray there is no hurricane this coming year, but we are working together to make sure that if there is one, the response will be as efficient as possible," said Bush. The 2006 hurricane season begins June 1, and the president said his administration is working with local officials to make sure communications are clearer and supplies are effectively positioned in advance, The Associated Press reports.
April 27, 2006
Hurricane Katrina exposed flaws in the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security that are "too substantial to mend," and FEMA should be dismantled and rebuilt inside the troubled department, according to the final report by Senate investigators. The report, to be released to key senators today and to the public next week, makes 86 recommendations that would undo major changes made when President Bush and Congress launched the department in 2003, and would reverse parts of a reorganization ordered by Secretary Michael Chertoff last summer. According to a summary released to the media, it stops short of restoring FEMA to independent, Cabinet-level status, but would promote its chief to confer directly with the president in a crisis, The Washington Post reports.
With hurricane season approaching, FEMA is destined to repeat million-dollar mistakes of disaster aid waste and fraud unless it can quickly establish controls for verifying names and addresses, congressional investigators say. Gregory Kutz, managing director of special investigations for the Government Accountability Office, said he has little confidence that FEMA will be ready by June 1 to safeguard taxpayer dollars should a major disaster like Hurricane Katrina strike again, The Associated Press reports.
An otherwise unremarkable 1.2 inches of rainfall burned out three massive Sewerage & Water Board pumps Wednesday, officials said, though no flooding was reported. The problem pumps at stations in Lakeview, Gentilly and Mid-City are among the largest in New Orleans' unique drainage system and were driven by huge electric motors that sat partly submerged in saltwater for as long as three weeks after Hurricane Katrina as did scores of of others in the system, reports The Times-Picayune. The motors burned up when wiring insulation failed as they began to turn under a normal operating load, said Joseph Sullivan, the S&WB general superintendent. The rain was the first significant precipitation in what has been an unusually dry year, and the trouble underscores the vast municipal drainage system's need for almost $40 million in post-Katrina work that has received little public attention.
Thousands of hurricane evacuees who counted on a year of free housing and utilities are being told by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that they are no longer eligible for such help and must either pay the rent themselves or leave, reports The New York Times. Of about 55,000 families who were given long-term housing vouchers, nearly a third are receiving notices that they no longer qualify, FEMA officials said. For the rest, benefits are also being cut: they will have to sign new leases, pay their own gas and electric bills and requalify for rental assistance every three months. The process has been marked by sharp disagreements between the agency and local officials, and conflicting information given to evacuees about their futures. Although agency officials say they never promised a full year of free housing, many local officials around the country say yearlong vouchers were exactly what FEMA agreed to provide.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said on Wednesday he had settled a fight with U.S. disaster officials over trailer parks in the city, giving hope to people still seeking temporary housing months after Hurricane Katrina, according to Reuters. Earlier this month, Nagin ordered a halt to all new trailer sites around town after a contractor working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency clashed with residents opposed to one development. He also urged Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to fire the FEMA team in charge of the program. But Nagin said he rescinded the order following a meeting with Chertoff in New Orleans last week, where the two sides agreed on alternative sites and standards of conduct, allowing more people displaced by Katrina to find housing.
April 26, 2006
Many people who walked through Ochsner Medical Center's doors after Hurricane Katrina were New Orleans' desperately poor, according to USA TODAY. Before Katrina, they would have been cared for by the state's aging system of charity hospitals, to which virtually all state-administered aid for the uninsured and indigent is channeled. But the hurricane destroyed the city's two indigent-care hospitals and Ochsner, one of three big local hospitals to stay open, became a magnet for post-storm medical emergencies. State and federal funds to pay for care, however, did not immediately follow. Most private hospitals are ineligible for the assistance, which came to about $1.1 billion in 2004.
Michael D. Brown has figured out a way to transform disaster into profit, according to The New York Times. Brown, the former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency who was ridiculed for his management of it after Hurricane Katrina, said Tuesday that a consulting firm he had set up already had a half-dozen clients — including a disaster cleanup company, a modular housing manufacturer and an emergency communications equipment business. The bottom line, he said in an interview Tuesday from Michigan, where he was working for one client, is that he expects to be earning far more than the $148,000 he was paid annually as FEMA director.
April 25, 2006
Floodwaters were still sloshing around inside the houses of Eastover, a gated subdivision that was home to some of this city's wealthiest black residents, when the neighborhood association decided to hire a boat for a rescue operation last September. The rescuers were not searching for someone stranded, but rather trying to retrieve a roster of residents from the association's offices so it could start learning who planned to move back, reports The New York Times. The group was so well-organized and well-financed that it recently retained a professional planner to help respond to the city's requirement that devastated neighborhoods devise their own revival blueprints.
April 24, 2006
The Pelican Haven shelter is located in an old, crummy hotel, the Pelican Inn, that was vacant before Hurricane Katrina, reports The New York Times. This is the last shelter for evacuees run by Louisiana, Mississippi or the Red Cross, and on Monday, it is closing its doors, after seven months. Everyone, even the evacuees, seems to think this is a good idea. In the months since the storm, the shelter, a blue-roofed complex near the Shreveport airport, has gone from a bustling respite for families who appreciated the private rooms with real beds instead of cots, to a drug-ridden place where, on occasion, the National Guard has kept the peace.
Since the waters of Lake Pontchartrain poured into New Orleans last summer, emergency planning has gone to the dogs — literally. Fueled by heart-rending images of pets stranded on rooftops, surrounded by floodwaters, or trying to swim to safety, emergency responders around the nation have stepped up efforts to develop coordinated animal-rescue strategies for the next major disaster, reports the National Journal. Congress is considering legislation requiring states to produce animal-rescue plans, several state legislatures are weighing their own bills, and even states with no legislative activity are developing new rescue and sheltering plans.
April 21, 2006
A hurricane relief fund headed by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton will soon begin to distribute $20 million among thousands of churches, temples, mosques and other places of worship in New Orleans and other areas shattered by Hurricane Katrina, The Times-Picayune reports. The award is part of about $119 million the former presidents have raised for Katrina relief since they began soliciting funds last fall.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants 2,044 Mississippians to repay money the agency gave them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, reports The Clarion-Ledger. Some storm victims got duplicate benefits or more money than they should have because of FEMA errors. Others might have gotten FEMA benefits for immediate expenses that later were reimbursed by insurance settlements. And others benefited "by intentional misrepresentation," FEMA spokesman Eugene Brezany said. As many as 3 percent of all hurricane victims who received FEMA benefits could have to repay benefits. The recipients have 30 days to pay back a total $4.7 million of the aid that the agency paid in disaster benefits, Brezany said, adding that those who can't repay the full amount can set up payment plans.
As the June 1 start of hurricane season approaches, many New Orleans residents are determined to be more self-sufficient than they were when Katrina struck, because they think authorities failed them. Few of the candidates in Saturday's mayoral election have outlined a specific pre-hurricane evacuation plan, although most of them the city is not prepared for another monster storm, reports the Los Angeles Times.
April 20, 2006
Seven months after two powerful hurricanes blew through the Gulf Coast, many elected officials, law enforcement agencies and residents say Texas is nearing the end of its ability to play good neighbor without compensation, The New York Times reports. Houston's municipal seams are straining due to the area's 150,000 new residents from New Orleans, officials say. Crime was already on the rise there before the hurricane, but police say that evacuees were victims or suspects in two-thirds of the 30 percent increase in murders since September. The public schools are also struggling to educate thousands of new students.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson is urging emergency responders across the state to identify American Red Cross shelters in their communities before the hurricane season begins June 1, reports The Associated Press. But some Mississippi officials say the Red Cross shelter certification requirements are too stringent — the latest complaint against the charity that has weathered strong criticism for its response after Hurricane Katrina.
April 19, 2006
Massive evacuations during hurricanes Rita and Katrina opened the eyes of Texas health officials to an unforeseen landscape of behavioral and other health challenges, Texas Health Commissioner Eduardo Sanchez said Tuesday. Until then, the Houston Chronicle reports, health professionals never imagined the implications of evacuating recovering heroin addicts on daily methadone treatments to faraway shelters. That example is just one of many lessons health officials learned last fall, Sanchez said, as 450,000 evacuees of Hurricane Katrina poured into Texas just weeks before Hurricane Rita prompted mandatory evacuation orders of 22 Gulf Coast counties.
Alabama officials said Tuesday they intend to run their own network of hurricane shelters starting this year, using facilities at community colleges to house as many as 25,000 people at a time rather than relying on the Red Cross, reports The Associated Press. The state plan was developed in response to problems last year after Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of people were packed into improvised shelters including the Superdome in New Orleans, said Roy Johnson, chancellor of the Alabama Department of Postsecondary Education.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is reviewing the individual cases of thousands of Katrina evacuees in the Houston area deemed ineligible for housing assistance, federal and city officials said Tuesday. According to the Houston Chronicle, Mayor Bill White said FEMA officials assured the city in a meeting Tuesday that the agency would study the list of 8,500 heads of household who've been told they no longer are eligible for assistance. White said that many evacuees were mistakenly ruled ineligible to get aid intended to replace the city's housing voucher program for a variety of reasons — including computer errors.
Prodded by tearful testimony and an overflow crowd, a Louisiana Senate panel advanced a bill Tuesday that would create the nation’s first hurricane evacuation plan for household cats and dogs, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. The measure, Senate Bill 607, won praise from Hurricane Katrina evacuees, state Treasurer John Kennedy and Agriculture Commissioner Bob Odom. Gov. Kathleen Blanco has not announced a position on the bill, but an official of her administration told the committee that he is concerned about the cost of evacuating thousands of pets ahead of a storm.
April 18, 2006
Frustrated with the performance of the American Red Cross, Alabama's Gov. Bob Riley has asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff for the federal aid necessary to let the state assume primary responsibility for operating its own emergency shelters in disasters. The move comes after months of criticism of the Red Cross, inspired by what even the organization's own leaders acknowledge was its inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina, The New York Times reports.
Roughly 100,000 Gulf Coast families who had proper homes last year are living in flimsy travel trailers and mobile homes as this year's hurricane season approaches, according to Reuters. Just months removed from a nightmarish hurricane season that caused more than $100 billion in damage, crushed the city of New Orleans and killed some 1,400 people, the East and Gulf coasts may be in a precarious state facing a new season that could be nearly as destructive as the last.
Like college students cramming for a final, federal officials are giving themselves a one-month window to make sure Louisiana is prepared for another monster storm like Katrina, according to The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Monday that he will know by May 1 — a month before the start of hurricane season — where the gaps are in the state’s ability to handle storms.
Poor planning, untested procedures and communication breakdowns added to the devastation Hurricane Katrina wrought on the Gulf Coast last year, University of South Carolina researchers found. Their findings fit with examinations of the storm conducted by Congress and federal agencies, reports The (Columbia) State. After Katrina struck Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the university awarded nearly $400,000 for 18 research projects looking at varied topics, including estuary damage, nursing home responses, levee breaches and law enforcement problems.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday that an internal review critical of the agency's response to Hurricane Katrina is "very constructive" and targets weaknesses now being corrected ahead of the June 1 start of hurricane season, reports The Associated Press. Chertoff said workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency are getting better training and plans are being made to store supplies, such as ice, nearer to where they’re needed and to have trailers and housing assistance in the right place through competitively bid contracts.
April 17, 2006
Opal Jackson had never seen so many people who needed help as she saw at the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster recovery center in Houston on the South Loop, reports the Houston Chronicle. For months, it was the eye of a chaotic storm of evacuees from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and elsewhere who had lost homes and possessions in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least 200,000 families sought aid at the site, the largest recovery center FEMA has ever operated, said Jackson, an agency spokeswoman. But after nearly seven months, the center closed at 1 p.m. on Friday.
Once the domain of government and charitable relief groups, hurricane response and preparedness are a booming billion-dollar business — from the self-heating food packets to the souped-up cellphone towers on wheels, reports The Associated Press. Call it Hurricanes Inc. "Private industry is the only way to go," said Joe Spraggins, emergency management chief for a Mississippi county hit hard by Katrina. The trend has been growing for a few years. But with 2004 when multiple storms struck Florida, and last year with Katrina, then Rita, it has accelerated.
A New Orleans house flattened but for a concrete staircase on a crumbling facade was among many storm-ravaged structures that federal officials deemed fit for occupancy by Katrina victims now living in Houston, Mayor Bill White said Friday. The Houston Chronicle reports that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has notified about 8,900 heads of households in Houston — representing more than 20,000 Katrina evacuees — that they will be ineligible for the cash assistance intended to replace a massive city voucher program that has paid their rent. A common reason was that the evacuees' former homes were now habitable.
April 14, 2006
The Homeland Security Department's focus on terrorist threats left it unprepared to deal with a natural disaster on the scale of Hurricane Katrina, the agency's internal watchdog says. "After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, (Homeland Security's) prevention and preparedness for terrorism have overshadowed that for natural hazards, both in perception and in application," says a report to be released Friday by Inspector General Richard L. Skinner. The study includes 38 recommendations for improving disaster response missions by the department and its Federal Emergency Management Agency, reports The Associated Press.
Nearly eight months after Hurricane Katrina triggered the nation's largest housing crisis since World War II, a hastily improvised $10 billion effort by the federal government has produced vast sums of waste and misspent funds, an array of government audits and outside analysts have concluded, according to The Washington Post. As the Federal Emergency Management Agency wraps up the initial phase of its temporary housing program — ending reliance on cruise ships and hotels for people sent fleeing by the Aug. 29 storm — the toll of false starts and missed opportunities appears likely to top $1 billion and perhaps much more, according to a series of after-action studies and Department of Homeland Security reports, including one due for release today.
Federal authorities have notified about 25,000 of Houston's Hurricane Katrina evacuees that they won't be eligible for the cash housing assistance that will replace the city's voucher program, city officials said Thursday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said evacuees deemed ineligible for its individual assistance program, known as Section 408, must vacate their voucher-funded homes or begin paying rent by May 31, reports the Houston Chronicle. City officials said this date is still being negotiated.
Battered by Katrina and bruised by Rita, the resilient people of Plaquemines Parish fear their knockout blow will come not from the next big storm, but from the federal government's move to exclude them from a strengthened levee system that would wrap around the rest of the metropolitan area, reports The Times-Picayune. Donald Powell, President Bush's point man for hurricane recovery across the Gulf Coast, announced Wednesday that the administration will not immediately seek $1.6 billion needed to beef up levees that protect lower Plaquemines and the parish's east bank. In a cold cost-benefit calculation, Powell said the administration could not justify spending that huge sum on an area that before Katrina was home to 14,000 people — just 2 percent of the region's population.
April 13, 2006
The Bush administration proposed spending an additional $2.5 billion for New Orleans levee construction yesterday as it issued long-awaited construction guidelines for the flood-prone region. The Washington Post reports that the new guides would require rebuilding many heavily damaged houses at least three feet above ground. With tens of thousands of houses awaiting reconstruction, the moves could help resolve an impasse over how to rebuild the low-lying metropolis. Uncertainty over the levees has left homeowners unsure about how high houses should stand to avoid flooding or whether to rebuild at all.
Emergency officials from hurricane-stricken states appealed to the nation's homeland security chief Wednesday for help preparing for the upcoming storm season, seeking plans for everything from evacuation routes to pet protection, reports The Associated Press. The requests underscored what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described as a "great wake-up call" for state and local authorities following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Chertoff, attending an annual hurricane preparedness conference in Orlando, said the federal government should not be considered the first line of defense during disasters. But he acknowledged that parts of the Katrina-battered Gulf Coast would need more aggressive federal aid in readying for the June 1 start of the hurricane season.
The shrimpers, fishing captains and oystermen along the Gulf Coast seem to have been forgotten as the government funnels aid to a region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The Associated Press reports that very little of the $68 billion appropriated has found its way to the watermen of the Gulf or to rebuild onshore facilities. Meanwhile, massive amounts of debris have made shrimping dangerous in many areas and oysterbeds have been ruined by silt. As the Senate prepares to debate the latest Katrina aid bill, the watermen are pinning their hopes on an ambitious $1.1 billion aid plan by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
Former FEMA chief Michael Brown says he'll still offer advice to hurricane-battered St. Bernard Parish, but he won't serve as a paid consultant because it would just stir up controversy, according to The Associated Press. Brown, whose name became synonymous with government ineptitude in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had planned to meet with officials in the parish Thursday about a consulting contract to help the parish cut through red tape as it navigates the federal bureaucracy. He canceled that trip Wednesday after some lawmakers and residents protested.
While some Gulf Coast residents hunker down on moldy mattresses in scavenged tents in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, 10,477 government trailers slated for Katrina survivors sit empty in Hope, Ark., according to The Christian Science Monitor. These ragged dome tents are part of a network of official and unofficial tent cities in the woods and along railroad tracks up and down the Gulf Coast. But getting tent residents into sturdier abodes has been a tough task. The Federal Emergency Management Agency says it seeks to stop fraud by requiring people to provide proof of their previous residence in the area. The agency also ensures that trailers are placed out of floodzones, as legally required. But that people are making their homes in tents reflects poor planning and inflexible management, critics say. And it shows how the social safety net is fraying, others add.
See Christian Science Monitor article
After weeks of delay, the New Orleans coroner is allowing DNA samples to be taken in an effort to identify remains of presumed Hurricane Katrina fatalities found in New Orleans since mid-February, reports The Times-Picayune. The collection of samples from the 15 bodies could provide breakthrough identifications for a number of families longing to know the fate of their loved ones lost after the storm. A coordinated effort by state and federal agencies, genetics experts, universities, private labs, contractors and volunteer organizations has been building a data pool of DNA profiles for hundreds of people who might be related to unidentified victims.
April 12, 2006
Red Cross officials announced plans yesterday to dramatically increase their stockpile of food and other disaster supplies in key danger zones nationwide and partner with community-based organizations to speed assistance to victims — all to avoid a repeat of problems the charity experienced last year in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The Washington Post reports that the changes mark a shift in how the nonprofit conducts itself. Traditionally, the Red Cross has relied largely on its own resources in times of crisis. The future will find it relying much more on community-based groups when it confronts disasters.
The Homeland Security Department is tapping federal disaster responders for 13 states, readying them now to deliver fast aid and supplies to victims during the looming hurricane season, reports The Associated Press. The disaster coordinators are being placed in Gulf Coast and Mid-Atlantic states as part of an organizational overhaul at Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which were widely blamed for the government's sluggish response last year to Hurricane Katrina.
April 11, 2006
Louisiana Rep. Richard Baker, the Republican congressman who drafted a hurricane recovery plan torpedoed by the Bush administration this year, has asked Gov. Kathleen Blanco to extend the public review period for her rebuilding proposal. Baker said that he has several critical questions about the state proposal that were heightened by the release Monday of a study of the rebuilding costs associated with his original plan, reports The Times-Picayune. He said there are not enough details in the housing proposal drafted by Blanco's Louisiana Recovery Authority, particularly on how the state plans to deal with property that is bought from homeowners who want to relocate.
The Bush administration and members of Congress say they are concerned that taxpayers affected by Katrina and Rita could miss out on billions of dollars of disaster-targeted tax breaks simply because they are unaware of them, delaying the Gulf Coast's recovery, reports The Times-Picayune. "These are not automatic benefits. In many cases, people need to seek them out," said Donald Mains, deputy assistant secretary for economic development at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The bodies of storm victims are still being discovered in New Orleans — in March alone there were nine, along with one skull. Many bodies were overlooked in initial searches, The New York Times reports. The corpses — some skeletonized, half-eaten by animals or missing limbs — have been found lodged in piles of rubble, dangling from rafters and lying on parlor floors. In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina, more than 1,200 bodies were recovered in Louisiana. But the process, hamstrung by money shortages and red tape, never really ended.
The floodwaters of hurricanes Katrina and Rita disturbed hundreds of coffins, many forced from their grave sites without identifying markers to provide information about who was buried inside them, reports The Associated Press. Now, Louisiana lawmakers are considering ways to make those caskets more identifiable in case the state has another flood. The House Commerce Committee on Monday approved a bill that would require funeral homes to include some sort of ID or inscription on each casket that would list the name of the person in the coffin, the date of death and the name of the funeral home that handled the burial.
April 10, 2006
Recurring flood loss has long bedeviled homeowners in Louisiana, which leads the nation in repeat claims filed with the National Flood Insurance Program, according to The Times-Picayune. While limited money has been available since 1994 to flood-proof these houses, Hurricane Katrina has loosed a huge stream of federal assistance that should allow most owners to elevate vulnerable homes without the customary hassle. Many owners grappling with severe repeat flood loss live in post-World War II homes built on slabs before the development of federal flood maps; their homes have taken on water during tropical storms and ordinary downpours for years.
Assailed for its many missteps in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the American Red Cross is plunging into a daunting, two-track effort to overhaul its entire disaster response system and the often cumbersome way it governs itself, The Associated Press reports. There is pressure to move quickly and convincingly — the new hurricane season starts June 1 and the Red Cross is hurrying to get its new response plans in place before storms arrive. The organization hopes to complete an independent audit this summer and offer governance reform proposals to Congress before skeptical politicians start pushing their own reform plans.
April 7, 2006
Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is negotiating a consulting contract with St. Bernard Parish, the area in New Orleans hardest-hit by Hurricane Katrina, Bloomberg News reports. Katrina spawned floodwaters that inundated the low-lying community between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico for two weeks after its Aug. 29 landfall. The storm claimed 129 lives and destroyed 26,000 homes there. Parish leaders expressed confidence in Brown's ability to help them compete more effectively with large communities for federal funding and speed a recovery they say has been mired in bureaucratic red tape.
Five chiefs of small villages in the African nation of Cameroon gave Louisiana $868 in hurricane recovery contributions from their villagers. The amount may have been small, but it represents a huge sum in a land where the average salary is 45 cents a day, reports The Associated Press. The villagers saw pictures of the storm on TV and wanted to help, according to a Louisiana state senator. He says they thought the state was gone and they were frightened for Louisiana residents.
April 6, 2006
Federal auditors laid out a scenario of omissions, missteps and bureaucratic nightmares that caused the loss of money and other donations sent from abroad to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, according to The Associated Press. The Government Accountability Office attributed the errors, which involved as many as eight government agencies, to the United States' lack of experience as a recipient of huge amounts of aid from others.
should not expect to get any money until at least late summer, the head of Gov. Kathleen Blanco's recovery group said Wednesday as the latest version of the state's housing recovery program was unveiled. State officials have always said they will not start dispensing money to homeowners as part of their proposed $7.5 billion program until they are confident that the state will have enough federal money in the bank to pay for grants of up to $150,000 per household, according to The Times-Picayune.
April 5, 2006
Two international Red Cross organizations issued scathing criticisms of the American Red Cross's chaotic response to Hurricane Katrina, accusing the charity of approaching the relief effort with a "dangerous combination of ignorance and arrogance," according to The Washington Post. The reports by the British Red Cross and the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, which sent experts to the Gulf Coast shortly after Katrina struck, say that their American counterpart was ill-prepared for the disaster, relied on inexperienced volunteers in key positions and had an ineffective system for moving supplies to where they were needed.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has given final approval to the state's plan for grants to Hurricane Katrina flood victims, reports The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger. In a meeting with reporters, Barbour also praised lawmakers for passing a balanced budget before ending its 2006 session last week and said he has no plans to call a special session. Qualified homeowners can receive up to $150,000 to offset losses caused by hurricane damage.
April 4, 2006
Criticized for its Katrina response, the American Red Cross will overhaul the way it handles future disasters by sharing its aid dollars with other groups and cracking down internally on waste and abuse, reports The Associated Press. The nation's largest charity promised the changes in a statement to a Senate panel on Monday, following its acknowledgment last year that its $2 billion response to the Gulf Coast storm fell short.
An internal Federal Emergency Management Agency report calls for urgent reform after Hurricane Katrina and outlines old failures the disaster response agency was warned about five months before the storm struck, The Associated Press reports. A Feb.13 report assessing FEMA’s response to the storm concludes the agency suffered from confusing leadership roles, outdated or inadequate response plans and inexperienced or under-trained staff during Katrina. It also details problems in tracking supplies to disaster sites.
Relations between New Orleans and the U.S. agency in charge of funding Hurricane Katrina rebuilding hit a new low on Monday when the city demanded Washington replace a federal team for “disrespecting” citizens, reports Reuters. The demand was sparked by a weekend fracas during which security guards threatened homeowners opposed to a temporary housing site. It is the latest of several battles between the city and FEMA dating back to the devastating Aug. 29 storm. Mayor Ray Nagin said he will urge U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to replace the FEMA team in charge of setting up the travel-trailer villages that have sprung up to house residents whose homes were damaged in the hurricane.
Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti threatened Monday to sue the federal government for giving the state “the runaround” on auditing financial records related to the hurricane recovery, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. FEMA has sent a $156 million bill for the state’s share of storm expenses. It is the first installment in what is expected to be a $1 billion bill. Last week, FEMA gave the state a two-month extension on paying the $156 million.
April 3, 2006
Unconvinced that the administration is serious about fixing the Federal Emergency Management Agency or that there is enough time actually to get it done before President Bush's second term ends, seven candidates for director or another top FEMA job said in interviews that they had pulled themselves out of the running, The New York Times reports. Now, with the next hurricane season only two months away, the Bush administration finally has come up with a convenient — but somewhat embarrassing — solution. Bush, several former and current FEMA officials said, intends to nominate R. David Paulison, a former fire official who has been filling in for the past seven months, to take on the job permanently.
Hurricane Katrina victims living in cramped trailers soon could be able to move into sunny little cottages with big porches that are built to withstand wind and water. USA TODAY reports that the Senate is considering an unprecedented step: allowing FEMA to provide inexpensive, permanent housing to Americans who have lost their homes to a natural disaster. The Senate Appropriations Committee, headed by Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, will consider adding money to President Bush's $19 billion request aimed at helping the Gulf Coast recover from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Mississippi officials hope the panel approves funding to build 20,000 Katrina Cottages — tiny homes born of a new architectural movement that look like traditional Gulf Coast cottages.
When Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless, to taste hunger and feel thirst, to go without medical care or even toilets. And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." The Associated Press reports that advocates for the poor say it didn't happen.
March 31, 2006
Portions of four major emergency housing contracts awarded after Hurricane Katrina are being rebid to smaller, local companies in the Gulf Coast region, the chief of the nation's disaster agency says. That will ensure that at least $1.5 billion in federal contracts are awarded competitively, R. David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
Much of New Orleans' rebirth from Hurricane Katrina hinges on factors beyond the government's control and could take up to a quarter-century to complete, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery chief, Don Powell, told The Associated Press Thursday. Powell said luring homeowners and businesses back to the hurricane-ravaged city "depends on a lot of factors that, I think, are out of our control." Issues with housing, public safety and private investment are largely being decided by local authorities who Powell said "will be in control of their destiny."
The American Red Cross, plagued by continuing controversy over its Hurricane Katrina relief effort, said yesterday that it is turning over to federal law enforcement officials results of its investigation into possible wrongdoing at a food and warehouse operation in New Orleans, reports The Washington Post. It also thanked volunteers who brought the matter to their attention. The embattled charity has spent much of the last six months defending how it used $2.1 billion in donations it received for victims of hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
March 30, 2006
Thousands of Houston hurricane evacuees will be unable to find apartments they can afford as their city vouchers expire in coming months, raising concerns that a number could end up homeless, reports the Houston Chronicle. A new study of the Houston area's rental housing market, commissioned by the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, found a shortage of almost 14,000 apartments affordable to families of five earning up to $26,360 a year — the income category thought to apply to most Katrina and Rita evacuees living in Houston. The Treasury Department recently authorized an additional $3.5 million in tax credits to help Texas hurricane evacuees, and the state has asked for an additional $45 million in credits. But the new study shows that reliance on this program to house evacuees is not likely to be effective.
March 29, 2006
Federal and state emergency officials promised a different approach on Tuesday to the coming hurricane season, saying they would no longer use "last resort" shelters like the Superdome to house displaced residents, according to The New York Times. Instead, they said, they will put into effect a better system of communication and evacuation to get residents away from the path of a storm.
March 28, 2006
The government has slowed down in deciding whether to approve hundreds of applications for federal loans to help small businesses recover from Hurricane Katrina, a senator said Monday. The Associated Press reports that earlier this year, the government was resolving 355 cases daily; that figure has dropped to 99 cases daily. The slowdown came as 682 disaster assistance employees left the Small Business Administration, said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate committee that oversees the agency.
March 27, 2006
In a major shake-up of its relief operations in New Orleans, the American Red Cross dismissed two key supervisors as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into the improper diversion of relief supplies after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross official said. The New York Times reports that the supervisors — volunteers, as are 95 percent of Red Cross personnel — were in charge of the organization's kitchens and shelters, which have assisted tens of thousands of the hurricane's victims. The move came a day after the interim president of the Red Cross said the organization was investigating accusations of impropriety, including possible criminal activity.
FEMA has broken its promise to reopen four multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts for Hurricane Katrina work, including three that federal auditors say wasted significant amounts of money. The Associated Press reports that officials said they awarded the four contracts last October to speed recovery efforts that might have been slowed by competitive bidding. Some critics suggested they were rewards for politically connected firms.
March 24, 2006
Amid growing concern about the city’s homicide rate and overburdened social services, a new poll finds Houstonians increasingly weary and wary of the 150,000 Louisiana evacuees who landed there after Hurricane Katrina, reports the Houston Chronicle. Three-quarters of Harris County residents surveyed by Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg say the influx of Katrina evacuees, many of whom remain seven months after landfall, has put a "considerable strain" on the Houston community. Additionally, two-thirds say evacuees bear responsibility for "a major increase in violent crime," and twice as many local residents believe Houston will be "worse off" rather than "better off" if most evacuees remain there permanently.
Nearly seven months after Katrina, the streets of New Orleans are still strewn with thousands of abandoned cars — many of them flooded-out, some stolen, some left by residents who have not returned since the Aug. 29 storm, The Associated Press reports. Many of the vehicles have been plundered of everything of value, including the tires. Many are encrusted with the dried gray muck left over after the floodwater receded. Some have become havens for insects and rats.
March 23, 2006
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco stressed to Congress last month the importance of a statewide emergency communications system that will not break down during a hurricane. However, lawmakers were told Wednesday that her $20.3 billion budget proposal for the upcoming fiscal year does not include $2.8 million needed to ensure that the southwest portion of the state stays connected in a storm, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. And Calcasieu Office of Emergency Preparedness Director Dick Gremillion said many local governments cannot afford their share of the cost for the 700 megahertz radio system that the state wants.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation into the drownings Tuesday of two construction workers could take six months, officials say. The Associated Press reports that the two construction workers drowned after passing out from hazardous fumes during a demolition project at the hurricane-ravaged Grand Casino Gulfport in Harrison County, Miss. Coroner Gary Hargrove said Wednesday. The men were pumping water out of a portion of the casino that collapsed during Hurricane Katrina when the accident occurred. Officials believe the two, working in water about 6 feet deep, became trapped in a tight space.
Faced with mounting questions about its pending contract with the city of New Orleans to remove thousands of flood-wrecked cars there, a prominent national engineering firm backed out of the proposed deal Wednesday. The Times-Picayune reports that the company, CH2M Hill, which is based in Denver but has had a New Orleans office for 10 years, said the controversy over the deal was one factor in its decision. But the main reason, company officials said, was a growing sense that the problem could be solved for less than the $23 million city administrators said they would spend on the CH2M Hill contract.
They are monumental things, these structures, as tall as four-story buildings and as brutal as bad public art. Each of them slightly resembles a giant's chair with massive steel lattices of pipe braced and welded every which way. But they could save central New Orleans from the next hurricane, The New York Times reports. The Army Corps of Engineers is now unveiling the 45-foot-tall frameworks that, mounted with gates, will soon be placed side by side near the mouth of the 17th Street Canal to prevent a storm from once again sending Lake Pontchartrain into New Orleans.
March 22, 2006
Nearly seven months after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and forced out hundreds of thousands of residents, most evacuees say they have not found a permanent place to live, have depleted their savings and consider their lives worse than before the hurricane, according to interviews with more than 300 evacuees conducted by The New York Times. The interviews suggested that while blacks and whites suffered similar rates of emotional trauma, blacks bore a heavier economic and social burden. And even as both groups flounder, most said they believed that the rest of the nation and politicians in Washington have moved on.
More than six months after Katrina and Rita struck, all 5,192 Gulf Coast children listed as missing have been reunited with family members in what became the largest child-recovery effort in U.S. history, reports The Associated Press. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children worked with the FBI, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Postal Service, Red Cross and other agencies to reunite children separated from their parents or guardians when Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29 and Rita hit just a few weeks later. All but 12 of the children were found alive. Most were found living with other relatives, family friends or other adults, an official said.
Almost seven months after Katrina's devastating assault on New Orleans, nearly 1,500 people remain missing, reports the Houston Chronicle. And hundreds of new missing-persons calls continue to pour in even as workers struggle to reunite families, identify the dead and close the books on a massive human lost-and-found effort. An official said that some "missing" individuals were reluctant to be reunited with their families because of financial or domestic problems. Names of those who proved to be fugitive lawbreakers were passed on to authorities.
The mammoth effort to restore the greater New Orleans hurricane protection system to pre-Katrina levels by June 1 is 46 percent complete “and accelerating,” Col. Lewis Setliff III, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers official in charge of the $770 million Task Force Guardian effort said Tuesday. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that Setliff, who is in charge of rebuilding the 169 miles of levees and floodwalls breached by Katrina in the New Orleans area, expressed confidence that the team of nearly 300 corps employees and more than 1,000 contract workers will complete its task before the start of the 2006 hurricane season.
Many New Orleans residents threw up their hands this week after hearing the mayor's urban-development plans, saying they will now look to the soon-to-be-released federal flood-plain maps in determining whether to rebuild. The Christian Science Monitor reports that while many of the mayor's recommendations are considered groundbreaking — including changes in the way city schools and government are run — it offered little clarity on the most crucial question facing residents: Where can they safely rebuild?
See Christian Science Monitor article
Determined to avoid a repeat of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says the city has improved its plans for evacuating residents during the upcoming hurricane season. Residents would be bused away from the city rather than to shelters like the Superdome, where people were stuck for days after Katrina hit. Locals also would be more likely to comply with evacuation orders now, Nagin said in an interview with The Associated Press.
With red flags flying high for the 2006 hurricane season, consumers who are thinking about sprucing up their homes this year may be better off adding a lifesaving "storm room" instead of that fancy whirlpool, reports CNNMoney.com. DuPont has been testing the market for pre-built storm rooms in the tornado-prone regions of Texas and Oklahoma for the past two years and later expanded the pilot test to hurricane-affected areas like Florida. DuPont may soon be joining forces with a major home-improvement retailer to market its pre-built storm rooms to shoppers nationwide as early as the third quarter, a company official said. According to DuPont, the room will resist winds up to 250 miles an hour; electricity and plumbing can be added and cell phones and radios should keep working even at the height of devastating storms like last year's hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
March 21, 2006
As hurricane season approaches, the city of New Orleans doesn’t have an emergency shelter, and local officials are asking for federal help to get people out of harm’s way if another disaster strikes, according to USA TODAY. Residents who can't leave town on their own before a storm this hurricane season (June through November) will be asked to board buses at the city's downtown convention center and will be shuttled to shelters in outlying areas.
The number of people from the Bakersfield, Calif., who have been indicted in a scheme that bilked thousands of dollars from an American Red Cross fund designated for Hurricane Katrina victims has risen to 61, federal authorities said. The Associated Press reports that eight people were indicted last week in federal court in Fresno on charges of wire fraud and filing fake claims to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. During the aftermath of Katrina, the Red Cross rushed to set up call centers across the country that provided qualifying victims with a personal identification number they then presented to receive aid funds from Western Union, prosecutor Stanley A. Boone said. The Red Cross contacted the FBI after it performed an audit and discovered an unusually high number of claims were being paid out at Western Union outlets in the Bakersfield area, even though not many evacuees had moved there.
March 20, 2006
How many contractors does it take to haul a pile of tree branches? If it's government work, at least four: a contractor, his subcontractor, the subcontractor's subcontractor, and finally, the local man with a truck and chainsaw, reports The Washington Post. For the thousands of contractors in the Katrina recovery business, this is the way the system works — a system that federal officials say is the same after every major disaster, but that local government officials, watchdog groups and the contractors themselves say is one reason that costs for the hurricane cleanup continue to swell.
Acknowledging that it wrongly distributed tens of millions of dollars in hurricane relief last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has said that it would try to recoup aid from thousands of individuals or families who fraudulently or otherwise wrongly collected money. The New York Times reports that officials at the agency said it was a routine step taken after any disaster because in the rush to distribute emergency aid, benefits were occasionally paid twice to the same family or to people who were ineligible.
Every Wednesday and Saturday, a band of volunteers converge on New Orleans' neighborhoods to attack what many now consider its greatest enemy: trash. The Los Angeles Times reports that they are tackling the heaps of paper, cartons, blankets, tattered clothing, wood and rug remnants that litter the city's streets and median strips — referred to here as "neutral ground" — six months after Hurricane Katrina tore through. Residents acknowledge that the city always has struggled with garbage collection. But the local government has faced a myriad of other post-storm challenges and only Friday kicked off a city-sponsored volunteer cleanup. Garbage has become New Orleans' new emblem; in many neighborhoods, more rubbish than cars line curbs.
With angry tones in their voices, clergy from more than 100 cities called on Washington lawmakers to end their squabbling over $4.2 billion in federal money earmarked to rebuild hurricane-damaged housing in Louisiana, and to direct more money to evacuated residents trying to return to the New Orleans area. The Times-Picayune reports that the clergy members said Congress has moved too slowly to put money into the hands of evacuees for repairing their homes and reviving their communities.
March 17, 2006
The government wasted millions of dollars in its award of post-Katrina Hurricane contracts for disaster relief, including at least $3 million for 4,000 beds that were never used, congressional auditors said Thursday. The Associated Press reports that the Government Accountability Office's review of 13 major contracts — many of them awarded with limited or no competition after the Aug. 29 hurricane — offers the first preliminary overview of their soundness. Waste and mismanagement were widespread due to poor planning and miscommunication, according to a five-page briefing paper. That led to money being paid for services or goods, such as housing or ice, that were never used.
Life is anything but utopian for those inside Renaissance Village, the first and largest trailer park founded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, ABC News reports. The absence of land-line phones, hospital facilities and a police presence serve as constant reminders that their status at the site, near Baton Rouge’s airport, is temporary.
It took weeks of crunching data, crossing fingers and lobbying in Washington, but Louisiana officials and the Bush administration succeeded yesterday in persuading the House to approve $4.2 billion in hurricane relief that state officials say is crucial to their effort to rebuild houses and apartments ruined by last year's storms, The New York Times reports. But the House did not require that all this money be spent in Louisiana as the state's delegation and the White House had urged, leaving state officials concerned that some of the money might be claimed by Mississippi or Texas.
March 16, 2006
Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, deliberately ignored a new national disaster plan and circumvented his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in trying to manage the federal response to Hurricane Katrina directly with the White House, according to a new House report. By disregarding the National Response Plan finished in 2004, Brown deprived "the nation of an opportunity to determine whether the NRP worked," the House investigation concludes in an addendum to its Feb. 15 report, "A Failure of Initiative," scheduled for release today, The Washington Post reports.
In its rush to provide shelter for victims of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA has created a pressing new Gulf Coast hazard: nearly 90,000 lightweight trailers in an area prone to flooding, tornadoes and hurricanes, reports The New York Times. Government officials along the Gulf Coast and in Washington agree that the temporary housing, while better than a tent or emergency shelter, is far from ideal.
In Boston and other metropolitan areas, faith groups have formed coalitions to give emotional, spiritual, and practical support to Katrina evacuees confronted with immediate needs for housing, jobs, healthcare, and schools for their children, reports The Christian Science Monitor. As on the Gulf Coast, religious groups are responding in ways that government cannot.
See Christian Science Monitor article
Two key lawmakers on Wednesday said government agencies need to establish partnerships with the private sector in order ensure that critical communications infrastructure is reliable and available during emergency situations. National Journal’s Technology Daily reports that Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, said private entities responded faster and more effectively to Hurricane Katrina than their public counterparts at all levels of government.
March 15, 2006
The White House has rejected hurricane disaster-recovery loans at a higher rate than any other administration in the last 15 years, according to a congressional study by Democrats. The report, expected to be released Wednesday, said business and home loan approval rates averaged about 60 percent after Hurricane Andrew devastated much of south Florida in 1992. The Associated Press reports that the trend continued through the rest of President George H.W. Bush's administration and into the Clinton administration, according to Democratic members of the House Small Business Committee.
March 14, 2006
Eric Thorson has helped Congress investigate abuse of taxpayers by the Internal Revenue Service and accounting fraud at Enron. Now, the Dayton Business Journal reports that he'll turn his attention to management problems at the Small Business Administration. If confirmed by the Senate, which appears likely, Thorson will become the SBA's inspector general. The first item on his to-do list would be to go to the Gulf Coast and investigate the SBA's disaster loan program. Given the record amount of loans approved for hurricane victims there, "we can expect there to be an unprecedented number of attempts to defraud the program," he says.
See Dayton Business Journal article
More than six months after Katrina, it sometimes seems like nobody's home in coastal Mississippi. Almost 100,000 Mississippians are living in FEMA trailers, reports USA TODAY. Hundreds of other residents are ineligible for such aid and have had to make other living arrangements while they try to repair their ruined homes.
About 100,000 homeowners are expected to register for up to $150,000 apiece in aid from a reconstruction plan unveiled by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The program has the blessing of President Bush, who is pressing Congress to provide about $4.2 billion toward its expected $7.5 billion cost. But the plan's prospects are far from certain, the Associated Press reports.
Everyone wants a Mississippi bridge destroyed in Hurricane Katrina rebuilt as soon as possible. But officials on one side of the bridge — those in Biloxi — favor a large, multi-lane structure that can accommodate casino workers and a new horde of gamblers. On the other side, in Ocean Springs, officials want to restore the four-lane drawbridge that once spanned the bay, hoping to keep their French-colonized, tree-lined town the definition of quaint, reports The New York Times. The debate over what should replace the Biloxi-Ocean Springs bridge in many ways illustrates the entire rebuilding effort along the Mississippi coast, where cities, drained of resources, infrastructure and people, struggle toward rebirth.
March 13, 2006
The Internal Revenue Service has used a fast-track approval process to grant tax exemptions to almost 400 new charities that said they planned to assist Hurricane Katrina victims, reports The New York Times. But one that distributes leather jackets to address the special needs of sadomasochists? Another that hands out new underwear? A spot check of the new charities shows that some have disappeared, while others are struggling to help storm victims or to broaden their mission after an initial spurt of activity. Over all, about $3.6 billion has been pledged to Katrina-related charities, with roughly 60 percent donated to the American Red Cross.
March 10, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency this week announced the end of its “blue roof” program, hailing it a success that helped patch 82,000 roofs in Louisiana damaged by Katrina and Rita last year. The Times-Picayune reports that despite the agency's positive spin, the program's $330 million price tag raised a number of questions about its cost effectiveness. Work prices varied dramatically, with one small company, Ystueta Inc. of Alabama, charging less than $1,000 on average per roof while other larger firms like The Shaw Group billed $3,000 or more for similar jobs. Those figures, critics and contractors have said, are nearly equal to what many roofers charge for labor and materials to install a basic, three-tab asphalt-shingle permanent roof.
A study by the National Council of La Raza has criticized all layers of government and the American Red Cross for failing the Hispanic community both in preparations for Katrina and Rita and in the response after the hurricanes hit. The Scripps Howard News Service reports that hundreds of Latinos lived along the state's coast and worked in the booming gambling-casino industry. Many spoke little, if any, English, but no efforts had been made by local officials to put out warnings and shelter information in Spanish. The group faulted FEMA for having no plan to disseminate emergency information in any language but English.
See Scripps Howard News Service article
March 9, 2006
One of three canine search-and-rescue teams trained to look for bodies left by Katrina plans to leave New Orleans after just a few days on the job because there won't be a hotel room to stay in, the men said Wednesday. CNN reports that game wardens Wayde Carter and Roger Guay said Louisiana apparently didn't make the proper arrangements with FEMA to guarantee them housing after Thursday night, and their supervisor, Maj. Greg Sanborn, has called them back to Maine. On Sunday, their dogs led firefighters to a man's body in the attic of a house in the Lakeview neighborhood — the first such discovery in five days of a new hunt for victims.
Senators and senior government investigators on Wednesday cautioned against removing FEMA from the Homeland Security Department, saying that doing so could further rupture the nation's ability to prepare for and respond to catastrophes. Government Executive magazine’s Web site Govexec.com reports that calls have intensified in recent weeks — especially among congressional Democrats — to make FEMA an independent agency as it was before being placed in DHS in 2003.
March 8, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency failed to set cost controls on hotel room rentals for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, an omission that led to "excessive" bills on some rooms, according to a new oversight report. USA TODAY reports that FEMA was still paying up to $364 a night for some rooms on Dec. 7, more than three months after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, according to the report this week by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. The findings expand on the inspector general's disclosure last month that FEMA paid up to $438 a night to house Katrina evacuees in luxury hotels in New York, Chicago and Panama City, Fla.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry demanded $2.1 billion more in hurricane relief from Congress on Tuesday, complaining that the federal government has shortchanged the state after it stepped up to help Katrina victims and then was slammed by Rita. The Houston Chronicle reports that the Perry said funds that were promised for housing and educating the evacuees, as well as for helping 75,000 Southeast Texas families repair or rebuild their homes destroyed by Rita, already have been scaled back. Six months after the hurricane, Texas is home to an estimated 400,000 victims of the storm. More than 38,000 are children enrolled in the state's schools, the Republican governor said.
President Bush yesterday ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create a center for faith-based and community initiatives within 45 days to eliminate regulatory, contracting and programmatic barriers to providing federal funds to religious groups to deliver social services, the White House announced last night. Pressed both by churches that have not received privately raised Hurricane Katrina relief funds as promised and by the outpouring of help of religious groups to Gulf Coast storm victims, Bush also called on the department by September "to identify all existing barriers … that unlawfully discriminate against, or otherwise discourage or disadvantage the participation" of such groups in federal programs, reports The Washington Post.
March 7, 2006
The next time disaster strikes, chances are the crowds of emergency and rescue personnel racing to the scene still won't be able to do a fundamental task: talk to one another. Newhouse News Service reports that despite years of meetings and billions of dollars in federal spending, many police can't communicate with fire departments from a neighboring county or state, never mind the governor's emergency operations center, state cops or the National Guard — a problem that became evident on Sept. 11, 2001, and again during Hurricane Katrina.
See Newhouse News Service article
There is no national registry for missing people after a natural disaster and there are no plans to establish one in time for the coming hurricane season, according to government spokesmen. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that a lack of a national call center would be no problem if, as Hurricane Katrina has made many realize, the disaster that caused people to become missing did not span multiple states. There are approximately 300 cases of missing people in South Mississippi that are still unsolved because of poor communications and a waste of time and resources in the weeks and months after Katrina, according to several local officials involved in the search.
Most Katrina evacuees stayed within a day's drive of their hometowns in the Gulf Coast. A few ventured to the West and East coasts. But the Red Cross counted about 90 evacuee families that made the 5,000-mile journey to Alaska, the Los Angeles Times reports. The evacuees scattered throughout the state, with the highest concentration in Anchorage. Six months after Katrina, though, many have returned to the Lower 48, leaving only the die-hards — no one knows exactly how many.
If 2005 hurricane relief were a separate category in the U.S. budget, the only larger items would be defense, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The federal commitment in the aftermath of Katrina, Rita, and Wilma has hit $88 billion, with at least another $20 billion under consideration in Congress, The Christian Science Monitor reports. This has become the largest disaster relief effort the government has agreed to — more than the combined amount it spent for 9/11, the 2004 Florida hurricanes, the 1994 earthquake in Northridge, Calif., and 1992's Hurricane Andrew (in nominal dollars). It is equal to 20 percent of the U.S. defense budget for this fiscal year, as well as 20 percent of the $400 billion U.S. budget deficit.
See Christian Science Monitor article
The words "Ninth Ward" have come to symbolize a ravaged New Orleans. But the damage to the city is widespread, not just in the poorest areas, and rebuilding efforts will take years, National Public Radio reports. One of the most important questions facing the Crescent City is whether homeowners, government and businesses will collaborate to rebuild the city — or compete for control.
See National Public Radio article
Downed telephone lines and damaged cellular towers left emergency crews confused and isolated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, experts have told members of an independent panel gathering information to be presented to the Federal Communications Commission in June. Some 3 million telephone lines were knocked out as the violent storm hit the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said. The Associated Press reports that at least 38 area 911 call centers went down, and more than 1,000 cellular towers were out of service; as many as 20,000 calls failed to go through the day after the storm, and about 100 television and radio stations were knocked off the air, according to Martin. He said hopes the panel's work will help strengthen communications throughout the nation, especially in areas vulnerable to natural disasters.
March 6, 2006
Grass-roots groups that claim the United States failed to protect human rights of evacuees and workers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina have urged an international commission to press the U.S. government to address the abuses, the Hattiesburg American reports. Representatives from the groups that included the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance gave a lengthy list of alleged abuses to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States. One New Orleans Katrina survivor said the National Guard detained her, her family and scores of other evacuees on an Interstate 10 causeway in the broiling sun without adequate food, water or shelter.
See Hattiesburg American article
March 3, 2006
The release of a pre-storm video showing officials warning President Bush during a conference call that Hurricane Katrina was approaching the Gulf Coast and posed a dire threat to the city and its levees has revived a dispute the White House had hoped to put behind it: Was the president misinformed, misspoken or misleading? The Washington Post reports that to critics, it reinforces the conclusion that the government at its highest levels failed to respond aggressively enough to the danger bearing down on New Orleans. To Bush aides, the seeming conflict between Bush's public statements and the private deliberations captured on tape reflects little more than an inartful statement opponents are exploiting for political purposes.
March 2, 2006
homeland security chief that Hurricane Katrina could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to video footage. But Bush didn't ask any questions during the final briefing before Katrina struck on Aug. 29, but he assured soon-to-be-battered state officials: “We are fully prepared.” The footage — along with seven days of transcripts of briefings obtained by the Associated Press — show in excruciating detail that while federal officials anticipated the tragedy that unfolded in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, they were fatally slow to realize they had not mustered enough resources to deal with the unprecedented disaster.
See Associated Press article, view video footage
In the largest food stamp payout in U.S. history, a half-million families received $400 million in benefits. But a state social services agency investigation in Louisiana has shown that some cheated to get that aid, WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge reports.
Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., on Wednesday introduced legislation aimed at moving more than 10,000 manufactured homes sitting idle in Hope, Ark., to hurricane victims in neighboring states. The Arkansas News Bureau reports that the new homes, ordered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to house Hurricane Katrina and Rita evacuees, have been mired in red tape since arriving at the Hope Municipal Airport in October, Pryor said. The bill would waive the FEMA rule that bars manufactured homes from being placed in flood plains for the purpose of housing Katrina and Rita evacuees. The one-time waiver would protect FEMA from responsibility if the homes were to be flooded.
See Arkansas News Bureau article
While communities shun FEMA “trailer cities” and thousands of hurricane evacuees remain in hotels, 38 FEMA trailers have sat empty in a Lafayette, La., park for four months. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that FEMA moved 38 travel trailers into Lafayette City-Parish Government’s Acadiana Park Campground in early November and has been paying $15,600 a month to lease the RV pads. As of Wednesday, those trailers remained vacant, a problem FEMA blames on confusion over health codes that regulate the type of sewer system required for the trailers.
After Hurricane Katrina struck, President Bush enlisted a coalition of clergy from across the nation to distribute part of the $110 million in private funds that former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton raised to help victims of the storm. But six months later, Bishop T.D. Jakes, one of the ministers selected by Bush, said that not a dime of the $20 million designated for faith organizations along the Gulf Coast has arrived, The Washington Post reports. He blames the fund for not coming up with a plan to distribute the money to churches and other faith-based organizations.
March 1, 2006
About 600 Hurricane Katrina evacuees were flown to Utah in September in the nation's hurricane relief effort. They were met with a charitable outpouring of support and an economy flush with jobs. But The Salt Lake Tribune reports that the evacuees, and those who came on their own, faced adapting to a starkly different culture and climate. Some are thriving and plan to stay in Utah. Others are still jobless, homesick and isolated in their apartments, according to outreach workers. News reports document a handful turning to drugs or crime.
A top House Democrat released e-mails Tuesday detailing Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's role in pushing a $236 million federal contract for Carnival Cruise Lines to house Hurricane Katrina victims, the Associated Press reports. In a letter, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., called on Bush to explain his role in the award of the ''lucrative contract,'' which was given to the Florida-based company without a full competitive bid process. The e-mails Waxman released were provided to Congress by Michael Brown, former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Six months after Hurricane Katrina drove them from their homes and destroyed their possessions, some still live in shelters, others in hotels and FEMA trailers. A few have begun to rebuild. The worst natural disaster in U.S. history displaced some 770,000 residents — the most since the great Dust Bowl migrations of the 1930s. The storm destroyed or made uninhabitable some 300,000 homes, reports The Christian Science Monitor. Those who have returned live on lonely streets, along barren, windswept shores, and in tiny trailers beside gutted homes.
See Christian Science Monitor article
Six months after Hurricane Katrina hammered the Gulf Coast, survivors are still trying to deal with the tumult it brought to their lives. MSNBC follows six people it met during its coverage of Katrina and her aftermath to see how they are dealing with the financial and emotional blows.
February 28, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is a city of revelry — and a city of despair, National Public Radio reports. It is a city where some neighborhoods are up and running, and others are a wasteland. It is a city where some have found a new calling, and some can no longer cope.
Hear National Public Radio report
The American Red Cross — castigated in a recent House report for its disorganization in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — had been warned for years that its management structure would plague future disaster response, according to documents released by a Senate panel. The Los Angeles Times reports that in a letter to the charity, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, questioned the effectiveness of its massive organizational hierarchy. After Grassley wrote the charity in December questioning the adequacy of its response to Katrina, he received dozens of letters, e-mails and phone calls from current and former Red Cross employees and volunteers. Among other things, they complained about: a lack of coordination between headquarters and workers in the field; the use of costly hotels, rather than shelters, to house volunteers; and top officials using contributions to hire consultants to buff up the organization's image.
February 27, 2006
Six months after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast, charities have disbursed more than $2 billion of the record sums they raised for the storm's victims, leaving less than $1 billion for the monumental task of helping hundreds of thousands of storm victims rebuild their lives, according to a survey by The Washington Post. Two-thirds of the $3.27 billion raised by private nonprofit organizations and tracked by The Post went to help evacuees and other Katrina victims with immediate needs. What's left, say charities and federal officials, will need to be stretched over years to rebuild lives and reconstruct the social fabric of the Gulf Coast.
Hurricane Katrina recovery brought more to the Gulf Coast than volunteers wanting to help storm victims. Law enforcement, bankers and storm victims, themselves, are seeing and sometimes feeling, the sting of a number of scams perpetrated, particularly against senior citizens, The Mississippi Press reports. While scams have been around a long time, the more creative ones surfaced along with the storm and talk of billions of recovery dollars.
While plenty of money is being pumped into the debris-removal effort in the Gulf Coast — about $1.5 billion so far, according to the federal government, which is supervising the effort and paying for most of it — contractors say most of that cash ends up not in the pockets of the crews on the street, but in the accounts of the three prime contractors handling the debris mission in Louisiana and an army of middlemen who serve no particular function. The Times-Picayune reports that the contracting layers have such a draining effect on relief funds that top federal officials are searching for a way to eliminate them.
February 24, 2006
Acknowledging the multitude of Hurricane Katrina failures, the Bush administration on Thursday advocated giving federal agencies from the Pentagon to the Department of Justice a greater role in the nation's disaster response playbook. The New York Times reports that if adopted through both legislation and executive order, the recommendations would reverse some of the steps taken after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to centralize responsibility for responding to natural disasters or terrorist attacks at the newly created Department of Homeland Security. And the plan could require the White House to play a larger coordinating role in future disasters.
Across the Gulf Coast region, churches, temples and mosques have struggled not only to rebuild their homes but to re-gather their members, USA TODAY reports. The damage has been so great that the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund, headed by former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, announced in December that $20 million of the $90 million it will spend in the region will go to churches and other houses of worship, which are not eligible for public rebuilding funds. An estimated 900 houses of worship in the Gulf region were damaged, destroyed or unusable after the hurricanes, according to Religion News Service.
Boone Pickens, the often controversial and always colorful Texas oilman-turned-investor, took advantage of a temporary tax break to make a gift that propelled him into the ranks of the nation's top philanthropists last year. At the end of the year, he gave $165 million to a tiny charity set up to benefit the golf program at Oklahoma State University, reaping him a tax deduction, The New York Times reports. Records show that the money spent less than an hour on Dec. 30 in the account of the university's charity, O.S.U. Cowboy Golf Inc., before it was invested in a hedge fund controlled by Pickens. By giving the money before 2005 expired, Pickens was able to take advantage of a provision in Hurricane Katrina relief legislation that allowed him a deduction for a charitable gift equal to 100 percent of his adjusted gross income, double the normal limit of 50 percent.
February 23, 2006
The nation must revamp the way it responds to major disasters or terrorist attacks, according to a new White House report that calls for more stockpiling of emergency supplies, a better-defined role for the military and a more concerted push to evacuate hospitals and nursing homes. Prepared by Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's domestic security adviser, the report is scheduled to be officially released Thursday. It does not advocate removing the Federal Emergency Management Agency from the Department of Homeland Security, which some members of Congress have urged, officials said Wednesday. But The New York Times reports that it does call for many other changes in how federal agencies respond to disasters.
February 22, 2006
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have disputed claims by ICE officials who said a lack of housing, fuel, food and medicine caused a weeklong delay in sending them to Hurricane Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, insisting that sufficient supplies were in place to accommodate 260 agents. The Washington Times reports that last week, ICE agents and supervisors said 300 agents trained in disaster response in field offices nationwide were waiting to be sent to New Orleans for security and rescue efforts, but were grounded by officials from the Homeland Security Department. Instead, they said, they were not deployed until days after Katrina plowed through the Gulf Coast, killing more than 1,300 people and causing massive damage.
State officials likely will require owners who receive renovation grants to elevate their houses if a FEMA cost-benefit analysis shows it makes fiscal sense, Louisiana Recovery Authority director Andy Kopplin said Tuesday, according to The Times-Picayune. Raising a house that meets that standard likely will be an attractive option because federal hazard-mitigation grants should cover the cost and the homeowner will wind up with a property that is less prone to flooding, Kopplin said.
February 21, 2006
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco outlined a $7.5 billion rebuilding, relocation and buyout plan Monday for thousands of residents whose homes remain damaged or destroyed after last year's hurricanes, reports the Associated Press. It is Louisiana's first comprehensive housing proposal since Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast. Assistance would be capped at a maximum $150,000 per homeowner under the proposal. But direct relief is still months away, and homeowners receiving the aid could be taking on more debt to rebuild.
February 17, 2006
The tiny Sugar Hill neighborhood of New Orleans is one of a handful of neighborhoods that survived Hurricane Katrina because of a geographical quirk — a narrow ridge created when the Mississippi River bored a different path through southern Louisiana. The Los Angeles Times reports that the few residents who have returned are far removed, physically and otherwise, from the larger, intact portions of the city. They are pioneers, not by choice, who shoulder an enormous responsibility: Because they own the only inhabitable homes in their pocket of the city, their blocks will become the anchors of reconstruction.
February 16, 2006
In an unexpected breakthrough in negotiations with Louisiana officials, the Bush administration announced Wednesday that the president would ask Congress for an additional $4.2 billion to help the state repair and rebuild homes battered by Katrina and Rita. The Los Angeles Times reports that federal support for housing reconstruction, which has been the subject of protracted negotiations between Washington and local officials, is considered a prerequisite for wider recovery because it opens the way for thousands of displaced people to return to New Orleans and surrounding areas.
February 15, 2006
The deaths and suffering of thousands of Hurricane Katrina's victims might have been avoided if the government had heeded lessons from the 2001 terror attacks and taken a proactive stance toward disaster preparedness, a House inquiry concludes. From President Bush on down to local officials there was largely a reactive posture to the catastrophic Aug. 29 storm — even when faced with early warnings about its deadly potential, the inquiry found. The 520-page report titled "A Failure of Initiative" was being released today as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff testifies before a Senate committee conducting a separate investigation of the government's Katrina response, the Associated Press reports.
Emergency rations paid for by taxpayers and distributed to Hurricane Katrina victims and military personnel to sustain them in their hour of need are being sold on eBay, according to a Government Accountability Office report. It found that government-issued Meals Ready-to-Eat are being auctioned off for profit, and that at least some of the MREs were diverted from hurricane-relief efforts. ABC News found 83 military ration items on sale on eBay when searching for "Ready-to-Eat Meals" — almost all of them government rations and at least 14 of them from sellers claiming to be Katrina victims.
More than 90 percent of owner-occupied homes damaged by flooding from Katrina and Rita are located in southeast Louisiana, estimates compiled by the Federal Emergency Management Agency show. The figures could bolster local officials' efforts to lay claim to most of the federal aid sent to the state for a proposed buyout and renovation program. The Times-Picayune reports that the numbers also suggest that the $6.2 billion federal pot committed to the state could be enough to finance a limited buyout proposal unveiled Monday by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.
February 14, 2006
The Bush administration yesterday acknowledged its mistakes and promised anew to re-engineer the nation's homeland security agencies in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, scrambling to contain the damage from sharp criticism by House investigators and testimony by the former head of FEMA, The Washington Post reports. The White House offensive comes as the House and Senate are nearing completion of separate investigations that will cast a harsh light on the government's response to Katrina and Bush's management of homeland security more than four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks made that task his presidency's defining theme.
Experts say that reforms announced by the embattled FEMA, such as having satellite tracking of trucks carrying food, bedding, and other relief supplies and creating reconnaissance teams to speed reports of disasters' effects are all well and good. But they also say that refurbishment of the bureaucracy alone may not address what a new inquiry called the root causes of the Katrina-response disaster — inattentiveness, incompetence, and lack of common sense, The Christian Science Monitor reports.
See Christian Science Monitor article
February 13, 2006
A blistering report by House investigators to be released this week is expected to say that Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives. The Washington Post reports that a draft to be released publicly Wednesday includes 90 findings of failures at all levels of government, according to a senior investigation staffer who requested anonymity because the document is not final. Titled "A Failure of Initiative," it is one of three separate reviews by the House, Senate and White House that will in coming weeks dissect the response to the nation's costliest natural disaster.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will announce wide-ranging changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the heels of a House report blaming government-wide ineptitude for mishandling Hurricane Katrina relief. The Associated Press reports that the reforms that Chertoff will unveil are expected to range from a full-time response force of 1,500 new employees to establishing a more reliable system to report on disasters as they unfold. They are the first steps to overhauling the nation's embattled disaster-response agency, which was overwhelmed by the Aug. 29 storm.
New Orleans lawyers on Sunday asked a federal judge to halt the eviction of 12,000 families left homeless by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita from hotels across the country. The Times-Picayune reports that the evictions, which are to go into effect today, could affect as many as 40,000 people who were receiving rental assistance from FEMA but did not contact the agency in time to make other living arrangements, or could not or would not make other arrangements, said Bill Quigley, assistant dean of the Loyola University Law School and director of the Loyola Law Clinic.
Unemployment benefits will run dry for thousands of displaced storm victims as their 26 weeks of eligibility come to an end next month, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. Eligibility ends for Katrina victims on March 4 and for Rita victims on March 30. Meanwhile, a federal program that acts as a safety net by extending benefits another 13 weeks likely will not be available by the cutoff dates because of a dramatic fall in the state’s jobless claims and, consequently, a drop in its unemployment rate.
Michael D. Brown, the former FEMA director, has accused the Bush administration of setting the nation's disaster preparedness on a "path to failure" before Hurricane Katrina by overemphasizing the threat of terrorism, and of discounting warnings on the day the storm hit that a worst-case flood was enveloping New Orleans. The Washington Post reports that Brown called "a little disingenuous" and "just baloney" assertions by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other top administration officials that they were unaware of the severity of the catastrophe for a day after Katrina struck on Aug. 29. Investigators say their inaction delayed the launch of federal emergency measures, rescue efforts and aid to tens of thousands of stranded New Orleans residents.
February 10, 2006
After Hurricane Katrina left thousands homeless on the Gulf Coast, officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama began calling for trailers to provide temporary shelter. More than 100,000 were requested, and somebody decided to create holding areas for the trailers outside the hurricane zone. Today, the Los Angeles Times reports, legions of wide-bodied mobile homes sit empty at the Hope, Arkansas municipal airport, a sprawling former military base. After all these months, storm victims can't seem to get the trailers, which are proving a mixed blessing to Hope and Arkansas.
Decisions and policies by the parent Department of Homeland Security doomed FEMA to "a path to failure" that led to the government's slow response to Hurricane Katrina, former disaster chief Michael Brown told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee today. The Associated Press reports that Brown, who quit under fire as chief of FEMA just days after the Aug. 29 storm devastated much of the Gulf Coast area, said that the agency’s mission was marginalized when it was swallowed by the newly created Homeland Security agency. The department had terrorism prevention, not disaster response, as its top priority, Brown noted.
New Orleans residents had learned to put up with unreliable services long before Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the city and killed 1,300 people in August, often shrugging them off as part of a laid-back character that was inseparable from great jazz music and Creole cuisine. But Reuters reports that the daily struggle and long waits many now face to commute, receive medical treatment or cut through layers of bureaucracy for insurance payments or housing aid has even hardened natives questioning their loyalties.
February 9, 2006
An independent study warned of managerial and logistical weaknesses at the Federal Emergency Management Agency months before its heavily criticized response to Hurricane Katrina. The 2005 study by the Mitre Corp., obtained by CNN, warned of unclear lines of communication within FEMA; a dearth of top-level emergency management expertise; low morale; and a lack of manpower, training and money.
Nearly six months after two hurricanes ripped apart communities across the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands of residents remain without trailers promised by the federal government for use as temporary shelter while they rebuild, The New York Times reports. Of the 135,000 requests for trailers that FEMA has received from families, slightly more than half have been filled. The delays have left families holed up with relatives or stranded out of state, stalled local economies and infuriated state and local officials, who criticize how the program has been managed. Further, officials and residents complain about problems with quality, like poor plumbing and electrical shorts, with the trailers they have received.
In the air around New Orleans there is a scent of temporariness. Gone is the putrid aroma of post-Katrina mud and sludge, yet the sour stench of stale French Quarter libations has not fully returned, The Washington Post reports. On the calendar, the city sits at a midway point between hurricane seasons. New Orleanians are angry that President Bush did not devote more of his State of the Union speech to the city and are concerned that Washington's attention is no longer trained on them. They feel as though they are living in the mean in-between.
February 8, 2006
Mississippians could get stuck paying thousands of dollars to have hurricane debris removed from their properties if it's not cleared by March 15, reports The (Jackson) Clarion-Ledger. That's the deadline to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency pick up the full tab for debris removal. Afterward, the state and municipalities, many of which have been financially decimated by Hurricane Katrina, each will have to pay 5 percent of the total cleanup cost. A 5 percent share could amount to millions of dollars for many of the Coast's hardest-hit counties and cities, which will have to decide whether to pick up any debris after the deadline.
More than 4,500 evacuees were expected to check out of their government-paid hotel rooms yesterday as FEMA began cutting off money to pay for their stays. Some of the evacuees leaving the Crowne Plaza in New Orleans said they had found other housing, but several said they were now homeless, the Associated Press reports. More than 20,000 storm victims were given extensions by FEMA until at least next week and possibly until March 1, said agency spokesman Butch Kinerney.
February 6, 2006
More than 10,000 religious people across the country have poured through the stricken Mississippi Gulf Coast in an unprecedented volunteer effort, according to The Washington Post. They sleep in church sanctuaries, RVs and tents. They leave behind jobs, schools and retirement for labor pilgrimages of days, weeks or months. Some have taken drastic measures, selling their homes and leaving family to move to the crushed Gulf Coast to devote themselves full time.
February 3, 2006
Local companies claim the garbage parade is passing them by while the out-of-state contractor hired to remove hurricane debris in Mississippi uses what they call underhanded delay tactics. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that AshBritt, the Florida company contracted through the Army Corps of Engineers to remove Katrina debris, filed a protest last month hoping to stop federal "set-asides." The set-asides would give $300 million of additional cleanup money to Mississippi companies and minority- and woman-owned firms. Local firms are upset because they feel they are getting a cold shoulder in their own backyards.
The Bush administration announced Thursday that it would ask Congress to provide $18 billion more for Gulf Coast reconstruction this year, on top of $67 billion appropriated last year. But it provided no details about how the money would be spent, and made clear that it did not plan to request additional aid for the region in its 2007 federal budget, according to The New York Times.
February 2, 2006
Responsibility for the government's bungled response to Hurricane Katrina extends widely but begins at the top of the Bush administration, which failed before the storm to name a White House, homeland security or other senior aide to take command of disaster relief, congressional investigators reported yesterday. The Washington Post reports that the blistering report by the Government Accountability Office contains the first assessments of the government's performance after Katrina. Bush aides, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and designees such as Michael D. Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency at that time, did not fill a leadership role during the hurricane, said GAO’s chief, underscoring "the immaturity of and weaknesses" of national preparations for terrorism and disaster. A spokesman for Chertoff, who has largely escaped criticism after the storm, called the GAO report "premature and unprofessional."
FEMA was overwhelmed by both the number and scale of disasters this year, especially after hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma hit the Gulf region within weeks of each other. One way it coped was with the help of 1,300-plus volunteers from the Homeland Security Department and more than 3,000 from other agencies. But in conversations with six volunteers from the Homeland Security, Agriculture and Commerce departments and the Social Security Administration, most told stories of mismanagement, information security problems, lack of interagency cooperation and wasted time and money, Federal Times reports.
New York City officials have struck a deal that will allow thousands of pieces of clothing seized from apparel counterfeiters to be donated to Hurricane Katrina victims. The Associated Press reports that the knockoff versions of items made by Rocawear, Phat Farm and Nike are among millions of dollars worth of fake brand-name goods grabbed by police raids in the past two years. Most of the T-shirts, sweat suits and jackets were confiscated from Manhattan warehouses and vendors' stalls and have been languishing in tractor trailers.
As evacuees from Hurricane Katrina poured into state-operated shelters in Illinois, the state Department of Human Services hired nearly 80 emergency employees to work with the evacuees at salaries sometimes reaching up to $9,000 a month. Cynthia Canary, of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, said she hoped DHS officials respected the limited number of federal dollars available for hurricane relief and questioned some of the salaries of the emergency employees, reports The State Journal-Register, of Springfield, Ill.
See State Journal-Register article
February 1, 2006
Despite ample warning of an impending catastrophe, the federal government bungled its response to Hurricane Katrina because of a void of leadership and confusion about who was in charge, an independent investigation ordered by Congress has found. Knight Ridder reports that the Government Accountability Office, the investigatory arm of Congress, in a preliminary report to be released today, faulted Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his designee, former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown, for not filling a crucial "leadership role during Hurricane Katrina."
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is expected to face questioning from a Senate committee today on why he was unable to get food and water to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center for 48 hours after he opened it to Hurricane Katrina evacuees. The Times-Picayune reports that documents released Tuesday night by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show that the city opened the Convention Center a day after the hurricane slammed the city Aug. 29 and that the Superdome became more and more uncomfortable because of failing sanitation and no air conditioning. Thousands of people from flooded New Orleans neighborhoods and downtown hotels looking for shelter eventually made their way to the Convention Center.
Federal, state and local officials were caught flat-footed by the difficulty of finding places to put 125,000 trailers for Hurricane Katrina evacuees. But they shouldn’t have been — a planning exercise called Hurricane Pam predicted the challenge nearly a year before Katrina struck, Federal Times reports. The 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise imagined a catastrophic storm hitting New Orleans and predicted with eerie precision many of the real-life challenges and events that followed Katrina, including trouble finding sites for the trailers.
Five months after Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans and launched thousands of residents on a furious, ongoing scramble for temporary housing, the fortunate people who landed FEMA trailers or rental assistance checks soon will have to prove they still need the help. The Times-Picayune reports that FEMA officials are, as required every 90 days, launching a recertification program of those aid programs. The process requires FEMA to weed out some noneligible beneficiaries, such as foreign citizens in the United States illegally or people who were homeless when the storm hit.
January 31, 2006
Louisiana officials did virtually nothing to prepare to evacuate poor, sick or elderly people as required under a state emergency plan adopted months before Hurricane Katrina hit, according to newly released documents. The Washington Post reports that state Transportation and Development Secretary Johnny B. Bradberry told Senate investigators that he was assigned the task in April, months before the Aug. 29 storm. But his department had no buses or drivers to execute the mission.
January 30, 2006
Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows. The Washington Post reports that while the administration can claim some clear progress, Bush's ringing call from New Orleans's Jackson Square on Sept. 15 to "do what it takes" to make the city rise from the waters has not been matched by action, critics at multiple levels of government say, resulting in a record that is largely incomplete as Bush heads into tomorrow’s State of the Union address.
A congressional investigation of the American Red Cross is set to escalate this week: The charity is due to respond to questions from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican. And USA TODAY reports that two House members, Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. and Jim McCrery, R-La., have called for reconsidering the Red Cross' official designation as the charity the government relies on first after national disasters. The two say that after Hurricane Katrina, the Red Cross did not respond quickly enough in low-income areas, did not reach remote Gulf Coast communities, could not manage its overwhelmed phone lines for storm victims, failed to cooperate with local organizations and was unclear in telling donors how their gifts would be spent.
Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show. The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before the Federal Emergency Management Agency put the officers to work, according to an Interior document obtained by The Washington Post.
January 27, 2006
An expense report released this week shows that Red Cross executives greatly exaggerated the need faced by the local chapter in Pasadena, Calif., due to Hurricane Katrina when they were seeking a large donation from the City Council. The San Gabriel Valley Tribune reports that the council gave the local chapter $100,000 last fall, expecting that most or all of the money would be spent housing hurricane victims who had sought refuge in the Pasadena area. What the council did not know - because Red Cross officials did not say so - is that all housing costs would be reimbursed by national Red Cross headquarters. But not a dime of the city's money was spent on housing Katrina refugees, said chapter CFO Rene Pilarte.
See San Gabriel Valley Tribune article
January 26, 2006
The White House decision to withhold support from a major Congressional reconstruction plan left Louisiana officials expressing bewilderment on Wednesday over what they characterized as the lack of a workable alternative from the Bush administration. The New York Times reports that Congress has appropriated $6.2 billion in reconstruction aid, but officials say that is not enough to meet housing needs.
An analyst for a Washington think tank says he's concerned about how Mississippi will distribute the $5.1 billion the federal government has given the state to help homeowners rebuild after Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reports. Will Fischer, senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told members of the Mississippi House Ways and Means Committee Wednesday that Republican Gov. Haley Barbour's plan for rebuilding the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast favors homeowners and might leave out renters, low-income families and those living on fixed incomes. Fischer said the governor's plan, which is still being drafted, will make it more difficult for low-income families to find affordable housing on the coast.
January 25, 2006
The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response. The New York Times reports that The White House this week also formally notified Rep. Richard H. Baker, R-La., that it would not support his legislation creating a federally financed reconstruction program for the state that would bail out homeowners and mortgage lenders. Many Louisiana officials consider the bill crucial to recovery, but administration officials said the state would have to use community development money appropriated by Congress.
It was touted as the congressional equivalent of a Christmas present: On Dec. 21, lawmakers approved $11.5 billion in rebuilding money for Alabama and the four other Gulf Coast states pummeled by hurricanes last year. Full delivery, however, may still be years away, The Mobile Register reports. According to congressional figures, the biggest chunk of that money isn't scheduled to come through until fiscal 2008.
January 20, 2006
Louisiana’s State Bond Commission Thursday approved $100 million for loans to evacuated homeowners wanting to return to New Orleans and rebuild their houses. The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports that the loans would be written on houses located anywhere in the city, said Mtumishi St. Julien, executive director of the Finance Authority of New Orleans. That means the loans are good for rebuilding in Lakeview, the lower 9th Ward and other neighborhoods whose futures remain uncertain because of vast damage caused by Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed, he said.
January 19, 2006
More than half of New Orleans’ 450 traffic signals are nonfunctioning or nonexistent, blown away by Hurricane Katrina or corroded by the floodwaters that followed, the Los Angeles Times reports. Nearly five months after the storm, traffic in New Orleans is, in a word, terrible.
Some Hurricane Katrina evacuees who found apartments in metro Atlanta are now getting eviction notices from their landlords --- and turning to social service agencies for help. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that with their initial emergency financial assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or other agencies running out, some evacuees in apartments don't know where their next rent check is coming from.
See Atlanta Journal-Constitution article
Former FEMA Director Michael Brown has placed blame on everyone from New Orleans' mayor to Louisiana's governor for the chaos following Hurricane Katrina. Now, he's including himself, according to the Associated Press. Brown said Wednesday he fell short of conveying the magnitude of the disaster wrought by the nation's deadliest hurricane, and calling for help
January 18, 2006
Progress rebuilding the Gulf Coast is still overshadowed by the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina, senators said Tuesday, promising more federal help as they viewed broken levees and the shattered homes of victims trying to restart their lives. The Associated Press reports that four months after the Aug. 29 storm, lawmakers said they were surprised to see how little progress has been made in places like Gulfport, Miss., where churches were gutted and trees uprooted, and in New Orleans, where piles of boards and rubble sit where homes used to stand.
There is a growing sense among many on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast that the catastrophic hurricane damage along the state’s 70-mile stretch of coastline is being treated as a mere footnote to the story in New Orleans, which was ravaged by flooding. Worse, the Associated Press reports, some say the lack of attention could hamper the recovery of an area that had experienced an economic renaissance in the past decade thanks to billions of dollars of investment by major casino and hotel companies.
January 17, 2006
Despite dire early predictions that the parish would never heal, and despite living conditions that seem unfit for all but the hardiest, officials estimate that 8,000 people have begun to repopulate Louisiana’s St. Bernard Parish, which used to have close to 70,000 residents. The New York Times reports that the repopulation is mostly an independent movement, with residents saying they have received little guidance or help from the local government as they clean, gut and rebuild on their own. Departments in the parish government have had to lay off up to 40 percent of their workers, and the parish is desperate for an infusion of federal aid to stave off bankruptcy until the tax base can be rebuilt.
Many look around and say New Orleans is far from recovery, especially with the next hurricane season five months away and the Army Corps of Engineers rushing to repair battered levees and broken floodwalls. But The Times-Picayune reports there is another camp, the glass-half-filled crowd, those who take note of a familiar restaurant opening here and there, the return of beloved neighbors, the reawakened streetlights and busy debris-removal crews. Is New Orleans turning the corner toward recovering from one of America's worst disasters? Will 2006 be better? So far, the evidence is mixed -- as are interpretations.
In the months since hurricanes smashed into the Gulf Coast, the federal government has set aside nearly $70 billion for emergency relief and long-term recovery programs. That's not enough, says U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. The Associated Press reports that Collins, chairwoman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said hard-hit areas–including Gulfport, Miss., and St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana–need more federal resources and attention.
January 13, 2006
The Federal Emergency Management Agency yesterday increased its count of people displaced from the Gulf Coast by hurricanes Katrina and Rita by nearly a third, to about 2 million people. A FEMA spokeswoman attributed the sharp rise to a reporting error, The Washington Post reports. According to a news release, FEMA is paying rental assistance to 685,635 families whose homes were damaged or destroyed by the Aug. 29 and Sept. 24 storms, an increase of 167,000, or 32 percent, over a month ago. FEMA officials generally estimate three people per household as a rule of thumb.
President Bush made his ninth visit to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina on Thursday and said he is encouraged by signs of the city's recovery, but Mayor Ray Nagin said he did not get the commitment he wanted on U.S. Rep. Richard Baker's proposal to form a federal corporation that would buy flood-ravaged properties in the city. The Times-Picayune reports that the president's trip appeared designed to reaffirm his commitment to rebuilding the flooded city, expressed most memorably during a nationally televised speech from Jackson Square several weeks after the hurricane. Aside from a few comments before a closed-door meeting with business leaders and elected officials, Bush did not speak publicly or take questions, and he did not, as he had on previous trips, tour any of the worst-hit areas of New Orleans.
Local leaders in Hancock County, Miss., are not buying a FEMA assertion that more than half of Hurricane Katrina's mess has been cleaned up. The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports that according to a FEMA statement released this week, debris removal operations in Mississippi are more than 60 percent complete. But officials in Hancock County, one of the hardest hit by the Aug. 29 storm, said the numbers are misleading, and are not a reflection of the progress being made here.
January 12, 2006
Angry homeowners screamed and City Council members seethed Wednesday as this city's recovery commission recommended imposing a four-month building moratorium on most of New Orleans and creating a powerful new authority that could use eminent domain to seize homes in neighborhoods that will not be rebuilt. The Washington Post reports that hundreds of residents packed into a hotel ballroom interrupted the presentation of the long-awaited proposal with shouts and taunts, booed its main architect and unrolled a litany of complaints.
Rebuilding Mississippi's hurricane-battered Gulf Coast to better serve its residents and take advantage of its economic potential will require bold moves in areas ranging from building codes to transportation, according to a report released Wednesday. According to the Associated Press, the report was drafted by the privately funded Gov.'s Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal Commission led by former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale. The commission was established by Gov. Haley Barbour in the dark days that followed the Aug. 29 killer hurricane.
Now-familiar scenes—of families marooned on rooftops and in attics by the flood waters in New Orleans; of a bus bearing elderly evacuees engulfed in flames on a Texas highway; of impatient Miami residents queued around the Orange Bowl for water and ice—shattered Americans’ confidence in the capacity of government at any level to protect them from catastrophe. So states are moving to shore up their defenses, planning for disasters they now recognize can be far worse than previously imagined, Stateline.org reports.
January 11, 2006
The commission devising a blueprint to reconstruct the city will propose on Wednesday a complete reorganization of the troubled school system, the elimination of a 76-mile shipping channel that was a prime cause of flooding after Hurricane Katrina and the creation of a new jazz district downtown, The New York Times reports. The commission report, several members said, will also advocate building a 53-mile light-rail system crisscrossing the city, connecting neighborhoods with the airport, downtown and other commercial centers. That system would be in addition to a separate heavy-rail system that would link New Orleans with Baton Rouge and the rest of the Gulf Coast.
January 10, 2006
The blue-tarp roof, a symbol of hurricane damage in south Louisiana and Mississippi as recognizable as curbside debris, may wind up as a post-Katrina emblem of government waste reminiscent of the Pentagon's fabled $435 hammers and $640 toilet seats. Newhouse News Service reports that depending on the extent of damage and the size of the roof, the federal government is paying anywhere from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 to install a typical tarp. The cost is driven up by layers of subcontractors, an expensive flowchart that sometimes produces the sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor, known in post-Katrina parlance as a "fifth-tier sub."
See Newhouse News Service article
Under pressure from a federal lawsuit, the Federal Emergency Management Agency acknowledged yesterday that it does not know which Hurricane Katrina victims are living in more than 25,000 subsidized hotel rooms nationwide, or whether they have sought or been denied other FEMA aid. The Washington Post reports that the disclosure came as acting FEMA chief R. David Paulison again pushed back a deadline to end the hotel subsidies, which have cost the federal government more than $400 million since the storm hit Aug. 29. Families in hotel rooms must call FEMA to register and receive a special authorization code, Paulison announced, and may stay until Feb. 13 if they do.
New Orleans hotels are moving to evict evacuees who have occupied rooms since Hurricane Katrina hit the city, but a civil rights group has found ways to slow that process, according to The (Shreveport) Times. Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman James McIntyre said the hotels can evict evacuees if they have returned to their normal room reservation process.
When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita ravaged the Gulf Coast, they turned dozens of communities into massive trash heaps. When the winds died down and the flood waters receded, the storms left behind a line of debris some 500 miles long. The National Journal reports that by year's end, contractors hired by the Army Corps of Engineers and other government agencies had hauled away some 40 million cubic yards of junk in Louisiana and Mississippi. Even so, millions of cubic yards of debris remained, much of it in houses that will have to be gutted or demolished.
January 9, 2006
The city's official blueprint for redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina, to be released on Wednesday, will recommend that residents be allowed to return and rebuild anywhere they like, no matter how damaged or vulnerable the neighborhood, according to several members of the mayor's rebuilding commission. The New York Times reports that the proposal appears to put the city's rebuilding panel on a collision course with its state counterpart, which will control at least some of the flow of federal rebuilding money to the city.
January 5, 2006
Into the void of the post-Katrina policy landscape, littered with half-ruined proposals, crumbling prescriptions and washed-out initiatives, an obscure and very conservative congressman has stepped in with the ultimate big government solution. The New York Times reports that Rep. Richard H. Baker, a Republican from suburban Baton Rouge who derides Democrats for not being sufficiently free-market, is the unlikely champion of a housing recovery plan that would make the federal government the biggest landowner in New Orleans—for a while, at least. Baker's proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation would spend as much as $80 billion to pay off lenders, restore public works, buy huge ruined chunks of the city, clean them up and then sell them back to developers.
The bulk of nearly $3 billion allotted to the Army Corps of Engineers under a huge spending bill signed by President Bush in the waning days of 2005 will pay for building and restoring Louisiana levees along waterways from Lake Pontchartrain to Venice, with nearly one-third going to rebuild local parish levees to their original design heights. The Times-Picayune reports that under the law, the corps will spend more than $1.1 billion to return levees, floodwalls and giant drainage pumps that typically are maintained by local or state authorities to their pre-storm status or better, while the remainder will be split mostly to expedite the agency's ongoing hurricane projects and to study flood control in south Louisiana.
The Small Business Administration has been heavily criticized for its slow processing of low-interest-rate disaster-assistance loan applications from businesses and homeowners hurt by Hurricane Katrina, according to The Washington Post. Trying to fill the vacuum, Sens. Olympia J. Snowe, R-Maine, and John F. Kerry, D-Mass., the chair and senior Democrat on the Senate Small Business Committee, tried without success to press the Bush administration into setting aside $450 million so the affected states could give out more "bridge" loans or grants to small businesses. Like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the SBA doesn't have a large permanent staff.
A mediation program kicks off Friday to resolve Hurricane Katrina insurance claims, but homeowners with disputes over the cause of damage—wind vs. water—likely will be disappointed. The (Biloxi) Sun-Herald reports that insurance mediation has focused on disagreements over the cost of repairs, not the cause of damage, said India Johnson, a senior vice president of the American Arbitration Association, which is administering mediation programs for Mississippi and Louisiana. In thousands of cases, insurance companies say water, excluded from coverage, damaged homes while homeowners maintain that wind, which is covered, caused the destruction. Some policies even purport to exclude wind damage when water was a contributing cause. Thousands of homeowners have filed lawsuits to resolve their claims and are ineligible for mediation.
Into the void of the post-Katrina policy landscape, littered with half-ruined proposals, crumbling prescriptions and washed-out initiatives, an obscure and very conservative congressman has stepped in with the ultimate big government solution. The New York Times reports that Rep. Richard H. Baker, a Republican from suburban Baton Rouge who derides Democrats for not being sufficiently free-market, is the unlikely champion of a housing recovery plan that would make the federal government the biggest landowner in New Orleans—for a while, at least. Baker's proposed Louisiana Recovery Corporation would spend as much as $80 billion to pay off lenders, restore public works, buy huge ruined chunks of the city, clean them up and then sell them back to developers.
The bulk of nearly $3 billion allotted to the Army Corps of Engineers under a huge spending bill signed by President Bush in the waning days of 2005 will pay for building and restoring Louisiana levees along waterways from Lake Pontchartrain to Venice, with nearly one-third going to rebuild local parish levees to their original design heights. The Times-Picayune reports that under the law, the corps will spend more than $1.1 billion to return levees, floodwalls and giant drainage pumps that typically are maintained by local or state authorities to their pre-storm status or better, while the remainder will be split mostly to expedite the agency's ongoing hurricane projects and to study flood control in south Louisiana.
January 4, 2006
Louisiana's first bills from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its share of federal hurricane recovery efforts arrived over the holidays, and they were a doozy: $155.7 million, with a 30-day due date before interest starts accruing. The Associated Press reports that more bills are expected to arrive in the coming months as federal officials tally their costs after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. States are required to pick up part of the cost for certain types of disaster aid from FEMA, including repairs to state infrastructure, efforts to minimize future damage from storms and some assistance for individuals.
January 3, 2006
The Homeland Security Department is poised to alter the annual competition for its federal grants, seeking to direct money to cities that face multiple threats—and not just from terrorism. The Associated Press reports that the change, outlined in departmental documents sent to state and local officials, addresses both the destruction and lack of preparedness seen during Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina evacuees around the nation who faced a Jan. 7 deadline for checking out of their government-funded hotel rooms have received a reprieve: Federal officials will keep paying for the rooms beyond that date as they iron out issues arising from a class-action lawsuit. The Associated Press reports that one issue is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which inherited the program from the American Red Cross, still does not have up-to-date records on the identities of evacuees in the hotel program or where they are staying, according to court papers filed last week by government lawyers.
As they plan budgets for 2006, officials in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere are first calculating the costs of providing for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. They've come up with some daunting numbers—and questions, the Los Angeles Times reports. Although they expect reimbursement from the federal government for many expenses, officials say they aren't sure how much they will receive or when the money will arrive.
December 23, 2005
A massive package of federal aid for Hurricane Katrina victims would come mostly from a dwindling Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster fund, leaving agency officials wondering Thursday whether they will need more money to help storm evacuees beyond next spring, the Associated Press reports. A massive defense spending measure that includes $29 billion in reconstruction assistance awaited a final congressional vote Thursday. All but $5 billion of that would come from FEMA’s disaster relief fund, leaving the agency with about $11 billion to help move thousands of evacuated families from hotels into homes.
Along the storm-hammered Mississippi Gulf Coast, 25,371 travel trailers provided by FEMA are occupied by hurricane survivors who will spend the holidays in confines for which the word cozy is laughably euphemistic. The Columbus Dispatch reports that FEMA trailers are about half the size of a standard mobile home. The oven space in the kitchen range is slightly smaller than a legal pad. The bathtub is the size of an old-fashioned washtub — about 2 feet by 3 feet. And because the hot water tank holds only 5 gallons, showering requires certain precautions.
Katrina exposed FEMA as a dysfunctional organization, paralyzed in a crisis four years after the supposedly galvanizing attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, The Washington Post reports. And it turned then-FEMA director Michael Brown — a former executive of the International Arabian Horse Association who had no emergency management experience before joining the Bush administration — into a symbol of government ineptitude. But Brown's well-chronicled gaffes in Louisiana had less impact on FEMA than his little-known power struggles in Washington. Brown lost almost all of them — partly because he was widely despised at DHS for his relentless infighting — and FEMA paid a price in money, manpower, missions and prestige.
The acting director of FEMA promised Thursday that he would not "abandon" Houston, but stopped short of committing to fully support the Texas city’s housing-voucher program for hurricane evacuees. According to the Houston Chronicle, the comments marked the first time David Paulison has publicly addressed the simmering voucher issue that prompted Mayor Bill White to accuse the agency of breaking its promises.
December 22, 2005
A think tank has announced plans to create an institute to help the hurricane-devastated Gulf Coast by finding long-term solutions to issues such as flood control, housing, education and emergency response. The Associated Press reports that seven universities in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are teaming with the California-based nonprofit RAND Corp. to conduct studies through the Gulf States Policy Institute. While many groups have attacked short-term problems from hurricanes Katrina and Rita, not enough attention has been given to long-term challenges, RAND President and CEO James A. Thomson said.
For some African-American residents who were driven from their homes, the evidence suggests unseen powers ordered the sabotage of New Orleans' protective levees to cause low-lying black neighborhoods to flood. The plot, according to those who believe it, was to use the deadly hurricane to transform this majority-black city into a whiter, richer place, reports the Chicago Tribune. And everything that has happened since — the delays in reopening the poorest districts, the shuttering of the city's public housing projects, the sluggish delivery of federal storm aid, the mass layoff of the city's mostly black municipal workforce — has only reinforced the fear of many exiled black residents that New Orleans will be reconstructed without them.
The Gulf Coast in general — and New Orleans in particular — has at times felt abandoned by the American government. But USA TODAY reports that they haven't been abandoned by Americans, who have volunteered by the thousands to clear out houses, collect trash, fight mold, cover roofs, feed the hungry, tend to the sick and help in any way they can. Now, as disaster relief gives way to rebuilding, volunteers are renovating and constructing homes, restocking libraries, surveying historic structures, tracking down voters and helping communities plan for the future.
A $29 billion hurricane recovery spending bill was approved 93-0 in Senate on Wednesday night after a Democratic-led filibuster forced GOP leaders to strip the measure of a controversial provision to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The Times-Picayune reports that the unanimous vote obscured the high drama during Wednesday's marathon session and the bill's torturous path to passage. The House, which approved a spending bill with the ANWR drilling permission included, must return to session today to approve one without that provision.
December 21, 2005
Last-minute opposition from the Bush administration stalled legislation to create a federal corporation that would buy homes damaged or destroyed by Katrina and Rita, according to the bill's sponsor. But Rep. Richard Baker, R-Baton Rouge, said the administration is willing to move the bill forward early next year if some changes are made, The Times-Picayune reports.
Internal meeting notes released by a union official say Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told employees that many changes planned for federal disaster response were a public relations ploy. The Associated Press reports that the purported statements were in typed notes issued Tuesday by a union representative for federal emergency workers. A Homeland Security Department spokesman said Chertoff considers the post-Hurricane Katrina changes one of his highest priorities and never would have made such comments.
December 20, 2005
Dozens of homeless Atlanta men have traveled to New Orleans to find work cleaning up the hurricane-battered city, along with cheap housing. There, Newsday reports, they have encountered the harsh reality of doing business in the post-Katrina environment - subcontracting and the problems it presents bit players, who went from being penniless in Atlanta to being penniless in New Orleans after working weeks without pay.
After securing $29 billion in aid for hurricane-ravaged states, Gulf Coast lawmakers held their breath Monday as the funds became entangled in a Senate debate over a controversial oil drilling measure. The Associated Press reports that the hurricane aid was part of a massive defense spending bill approved by the House early Monday but that was still awaiting Senate passage. The measure included money to repair levees, spur economic development and rebuild badly damaged roads in the region obliterated by Hurricane Katrina.
December 19, 2005
Since Hurricane Katrina hit, billions of dollars in federal aid has poured into the devastated areas of Mississippi and Louisiana, primarily for the most critical emergency needs: providing temporary housing, restarting governments and cleaning up the mountains of debris. The New York Times reports that on Sunday, leaders in the House and Senate moved to switch from a relief effort to recovery, agreeing to appropriate large chunks of money to rebuild the region and, at least in part, to bail out some of the tens of thousands of people who were financially devastated by the storm. The recovery package allocates $11.5 billion in new grant money, mostly for Mississippi and Louisiana.
As part of a program to help Louisiana recover from Hurricane Katrina, the French government soon will allocate $431,000 to the state's schools, the local French consulate said this week. About $500,000 more will be held in reserve by a foundation acting on behalf of the government, The Times-Picayune reports. About $151,000 will go to three New Orleans schools with special French-language programs that have reopened or will reopen in the next few weeks. Another $280,000 will go to other Louisiana schools, on the basis of $100 per enrolled student. The consulate's announcement noted that France has been involved for many years with efforts to promote teaching of French in Louisiana schools.
The U.S. Senate passed nearly $8 billion in tax breaks for Gulf Coast businesses on Friday, but denied federal help for casinos, liquor stores and golf courses, the Associated Press reports. Almost four months after Hurricane Katrina destroyed many area businesses, the Senate responded to President Bush's appeal for revitalizing the region with a special enterprise zone. The tax breaks for business investment are aimed at luring companies into the region and keeping those that are already there.
Hurricane Katrina taught the Department of Homeland Security important lessons about procurement, according to Elaine Duke, the department’s acting chief procurement officer. FCW.com reports that the devastating August storm showed the need for contingency planning within each federal department and across them, Duke said at a gathering of the Association for Federal Information Resources Management, a nonprofit industry group, in Washington, D.C.
December 16, 2005
The Bush administration yesterday pledged an additional $1.5 billion in federal spending to strengthen New Orleans's storm-battered levees, vowing to give the city "better and safer" flood walls but stopping short of explicitly promising protection against catastrophic Category 5 hurricanes. The Washington Post reports that the proposed new spending would double the White House's previous $1.6 billion commitment for levee repairs and match the level sought by Louisiana's congressional delegation in budget negotiations in recent weeks.
Louisiana employers are having trouble bringing back workers who evacuated to Texas, despite a Louisiana Association of Business and Industry and Texas Workforce Commission partnership designed to aid the process, reports The (Baton Rouge) Advocate. In the four weeks since the program was launched, 183 Louisiana employers have placed job orders, and the Texas Workforce Commission has made 2,066 referrals. That means 2,066 people have been called about jobs, spokeswoman Ann Hatchitt said. So far no one has been hired.
Despite opposition from some conservative Republicans, the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill Thursday that would establish a government-operated corporation to redevelop areas of Louisiana hit by Hurricane Katrina, CongressDaily reports. The measure also would direct the spending of $17 billion already appropriated for hurricane relief to rebuilding communities and providing temporary housing for evacuees.
December 15, 2005
The Republican chairman of a special House investigation panel has subpoenaed the Pentagon, and is considering sending another to the White House, to get documents detailing the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, the Associated Press reports. The unusual legal action was the latest twist in the congressional inquiry of failures related to the Aug. 29 storm that killed more than 1,300 people in Gulf Coast states.
The drive to rebuild communities devastated by Katrina has slowed, hampered by congressional money worries, mixed signals from the White House and confusion about which of the region's problems to fix first. USA TODAY reports that President Bush's pledge to rebuild communities devastated by the hurricane is running into opposition in Congress over the cost.
Citing enormous backlogs and high rates of declined loans for hurricane victims, a House Democrat on Wednesday called on the head of the Small Business Administration to quit immediately. The Associated Press reports that Rep. Nydia Velazquez, the top Democrat on the House Small Business Committee, said that a flood of missteps by the SBA this year make it clear that Hector Barreto isn't capable of leading the agency. Velazquez said that since the hurricanes roared ashore in August and September, the agency has declined 80 percent of disaster loans related to Katrina and Rita and has a backlog of more than 200,000 requests for relief.
December 14, 2005
The American Red Cross, facing criticism for its Hurricane Katrina relief effort, said yesterday that its chief executive, Marsha J. Evans, has resigned — the latest in a string of leaders who have struggled to guide the giant, often troubled charity, according to The Washington Post. Red Cross senior executives insisted that Evans's departure, effective at the end of the month, was voluntary. But others in the organization said Evans was forced to resign after her relationship with the 50-member board of directors deteriorated over issues of control of the $3 billion organization.
The issue of where to place trailer parks in New Orleans seems to have stirred tensions and rubbed people like little else, reports The New York Times. The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants to set up more than 22,000 trailers in the city in an effort to house returning residents while they rebuild their homes. Many will go in private yards, but plans also call for 22 trailer parks, said Rachel C. Rodi, a FEMA spokeswoman. The juxtaposition has raised simmering issues of class, race and neighborhood loyalty in a city whose residents were far more rooted than those in almost any other in the nation.
Forty-six laborers and truckers said they were promised high pay by a Georgia subcontractor to clean up hurricane debris in Louisiana but have been stiffed. Federal contracting and law enforcement officials are investigating their case, Knight Ridder Newspapers report. The truckers and laborers were hired by a group of subcontractors working for two giant firms that were awarded $500 million federal contracts by the federal government to get rid of the debris. With billions of dollars flowing to the Katrina-damaged Gulf Coast region, complaints are becoming more frequent that those doing the mundane job of cleaning up aren't being paid.
Declaring "Houston is full," Mayor Bill White said that after today, the city will cease giving hurricane evacuees vouchers for 12 months of paid rent and utilities, reports the Houston Chronicle. The announcement comes as city officials have grown increasingly concerned about a tide of evacuees coming to Houston from around the state and country. In three months, more than 100,000 have been housed in Houston-area apartments.
More than three months after thousands of people lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina, local and federal officials are trading blame over the slow delivery of trailer housing. "We got a serious situation in St. Bernard Parish (La.)," its president, Henry "Junior" Rodriguez, told CNN on Tuesday. "We got people living in tents and automobiles. We got people living in barns. We got people living in their houses -- in tents," he said on American Morning. Adding to Rodriguez's frustration is the fact that 1,400 trailers are sitting unused in St. Bernard Parish. The parish ordered them from a private contractor days after the hurricane hit on August 29, but FEMA has not agreed to pay for them.
A plan to replace a Biloxi, Miss., bridge heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina with a bigger version is sparking a debate over how the Gulf Coast should be rebuilt, National Public Radio reports. Before Katrina struck in August, the 1.5-mile, four-lane Highway 90 bridge over Biloxi Bay carried 30,000 vehicles per day between Ocean Springs and Biloxi. The state's plans call for a new bridge with six lanes that could handle double that traffic volume. But critics say the bridge plan anticipates sprawling growth along the Gulf Coast even as the region's leaders say they want to change that pattern.
See National Public Radio article
It will likely be another year, and possibly longer, before the millions of tons of debris generated by Hurricane Katrina will be removed from the streets and yards of southeast Louisiana, officials said Tuesday — and that's not including the mountains of debris expected when thousands of homes in the region are razed. The Times-Picayune reports that making matters worse, from the perspective of reeling local governments, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has told local leaders that come Jan. 15, it will no longer pick up the entire cost of the effort.
While far from ground zero, California businesses headquartered in the likes of Placerville, Tuolumne County and Fresno have all been selling goods and services to overwhelmed federal officials. According to The Sacramento Bee, some $63 million in Hurricane Katrina-related contracts already have flowed to California companies and fire agencies, and more are coming.
The Republican chairman of a special House panel investigating the government's response to Hurricane Katrina decided Wednesday to reject, at least for now, a proposal to subpoena the White House for documents detailing internal communications before and after the storm hit on Aug. 29. But lawmakers agreed to subpoena the Pentagon for similar Katrina-related documents if Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld refuses to immediately turn them over or explain why he cannot. The Associated Press reports that the panel's chairman, Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., left open the possibility of subpoenaing the White House later. "We cannot do our job if we don't get these documents, and we won't get these documents if we don't subpoena them," said Rep. Charlie Melancon, D-La., who sought to get internal memos, e-mails, and other communications from the White House and the Pentagon.
December 13, 2005
A federal judge in New Orleans yesterday ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to continue paying the hotel bills of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees until as late as Feb. 7, criticizing the government for inaction 15 weeks after the storm, The Washington Post reports. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval ordered the disaster response agency to pay for storm victims' rooms for at least two weeks once a decision is made on granting them rental housing assistance or until Feb. 7, whichever comes first.
A Mississippi congressman says he is furious that several hundred defunct trailers are being scavenged for spare parts in a temporary-housing graveyard, just off Interstate 10 in Harrison County. "I have had it up to here with Bechtel," Rep. Gene Taylor, a Democrat from Bay St. Louis, said of the California firm contracted through FEMA to install travel trailers. The local Sun Herald reports that Taylor's office sent a letter to Sid Melton, head of FEMA's housing effort in Mississippi, wanting to know why "more than a million dollars worth of trailers are not being used," and whether they will be repaired and delivered to needy residents.
December 12, 2005
The chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, vividly recounted in thousands of pages of documents recently released by Louisiana officials, sounded eerily familiar to members of the Sept. 11 commission, who delivered their final report this week. The Washington Post reports that emergency workers were isolated and unable to call for help for themselves or others; radios and cell phones were inoperable; and government was unable to respond to a catastrophic event.
After the winds, the floods, the deaths and the massive destruction, the battle over insurance claims has emerged as New Orleans' next great tribulation, according to the Chicago Tribune. State officials warn that four in every 10 Louisiana small businesses, starved for cash flow, face failure while waiting for their insurance claims to be settled. Emergency loans from the federal Small Business Administration are barely trickling in: Fewer than 8,000 had been approved by mid-November, out of more than 200,000 Katrina-related applications.
The homeless population in the Baton Rouge area has grown since Katrina hit, but social service agencies say that growth is just the beginning, The (Baton Rouge) Advocate reports. An official with the Capital Area Alliance for the Homeless says it probably won’t see the real effect until the Federal Emergency Management Agency stops paying hotel bills in January.
Nearly three months after Hurricane Katrina, the nation's biggest cleanup continues with a determination fueled by billions of federal dollars. Orchestrating this huge street-by-street campaign through one hard-hit, 60-square-mile sector of New Orleans — and supervising 650 trucks hauling an average of 54,000 cubic yards of debris daily — is Phillips & Jordan Inc., a general and specialty contracting company based in Knoxville, Tenn., with division offices in Zephyrhills, Fla. The St. Petersburg Times reports that the company is a hidden giant in the huge cleanup industry and has quietly racked up riches over the past few decades by tapping into two particularly lucrative and timely lines of business: development and disasters.
See St. Petersburg Times article
The federal government's medical response to Katrina was bungled by a lack of supplies and poor communication, according to a congressional report based in part on interviews with doctors who responded to the hurricane. The report says that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was unable to effectively set up field hospitals and handle the medical emergencies in the Louisiana Superdome, where thousands of evacuees were stuck for days after New Orleans flooded, the Associated Press reports.
A broad clash has developed along the Gulf Coast over whether to cede large swaths of land to nature, to rebuild much as it was, or to rebuild homes at a higher price with more robust foundations and on structures that raise them above the ground. The New York Times reports that the post-Katrina debate is playing out in Mississippi with a cast of characters that includes storm victims, coastal engineers, mortgage lenders, the insurance industry, and local, state and federal government officials.
More than three months after Katrina, thousands of workers cleaning up the unfathomably vast mess seem barely to have scratched the surface, says USA TODAY. With so much hurricane debris from Katrina and Rita — more than 100 million cubic yards, enough to fill the Louisiana Superdome 22 times over — they could be doing their dirty job for two years or more. The cost could be as much as $4 billion.
December 9, 2005
Hispanics who have worked in construction in other parts of the United States have been drawn to the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast by the prospect of good money from cleanup and rebuilding jobs, according to MSNBC.com. In Waveland, Miss., the pre-Katrina demographics had been 80 percent white, 15 percent African American and less than 2 percent Hispanic. Since the storm, however, Hispanics are very visible at the few restaurants now open and especially working at the largest debris removal sites.
The federal government's second-ranking disaster official in Louisiana yesterday criticized the Federal Emergency Management Agency's program to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees in trailers, calling the effort wasteful and counter to the long-term interest of more than 100,000 displaced families, according to The Washington Post. Instead of spending as much as $140,000 for each trailer and site for a family to use for 18 months, the government should hand out in a lump sum the $26,200 that Congress has approved for storm victims, FEMA’s Scott Wells, the federal coordinating officer for Louisiana, told senators.
Military officials delayed an evacuation of Hurricane Katrina victims from the Superdome in New Orleans late last summer, prolonging their stay in squalid conditions for another 24 hours, a FEMA official told Congress on Thursday. CongressDaily reports that the FEMA official, Philip Parr, who was working out of the Superdome, said he had devised a plan to use helicopters to evacuate victims to dry land and later bus them to adequate shelters in less than 30 hours on Wednesday, Aug. 31 — two days after the storm hit the city and massive flooding ensued.
December 8, 2005
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, the unlikely duo that has proved to be a fund-raising colossus on behalf of disaster victims, announced yesterday they would give $90 million from their Hurricane Katrina relief fund to universities, faith-based groups and other rebuilding efforts along the devastated Gulf Coast, The Washington Post reports. Bush and Clinton, who were tapped in September by President George W. Bush to lead a fund-raising effort for hurricane victims, have raised $100 million in their Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund.
Mississippi’s Gov. Haley Barbour delivered an impassioned plea to a House select committee Wednesday, urging Congress to quickly pass Hurricane Katrina relief legislation, which has been stalled for months. The Republican says that delayed federal assistance is causing businesses to reconsider relocating away from Mississippi, which would hurt state employment, consumer spending and tax revenues, according to a Knight Ridder Newspapers report. Barbour told lawmakers that federal aid is urgently needed for 10,000 temporary housing units, to rebuild demolished roads and bridges, and to fund school districts overwhelmed by reconstruction costs.
See Knight Ridder Newspapers article
Before Hurricane Katrina, the Gulf Coast was well on its way to becoming a popular gambling destination. Now, for the gaming industry, a second storm — this one political — is brewing, reports the Los Angeles Times. On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are split over whether taxpayers should help rebuild gambling establishments and other businesses objectionable to social conservatives.
Federal emergency response managers feared they were unprepared for catastrophic disasters a year before Hurricane Katrina hit — yet their requests for training, equipment and an updated operations plan were ignored, officials say. The Associated Press reports that in a June 2004 memo to Michael Brown, former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, leaders of national response teams said they were getting "zero funding for training, exercise or team equipment."
December 7, 2005
Of all the groups in the micro-melting pot of southern Louisiana hit by Hurricane Katrina, it's hard to find a more close-knit community than the Islenos. National Public Radio says the descendants of Spanish-speaking Canary Islanders who settled St. Bernard Parish more than 200 years ago are now struggling to restore a community that was dispersed by Katrina's winds and floods.
See National Public Radio article
A Red Cross volunteer in Texas and his sister were arrested Tuesday on charges of stealing more than 100 debit cards from the charity to obtain goods fraudulently, a plot that may have cost the Red Cross more than $230,000 donated for Katrina victims. The New York Times reports that the stolen cards were used to buy jewelry, cars, clothing, shoes and other items the two sometimes gave as gifts, authorities said. This is the second major fraud case involving a Red Cross volunteer or contract worker to emerge since Katrina struck.
December 6, 2005
Facing a growing body count and shortages of food, water and ice, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials braced for riots in Mississippi in the days following Hurricane Katrina, new documents reveal. The Associated Press reports that FEMA officials knew their response system had been shattered by the Aug. 29 storm and were unable to provide fast help — even when the needs were obvious.
Two days after Katrina hit New Orleans, thousands were trapped in the city without food, water and medical care. But The Times-Picayune reports that a top aide to Gov. Kathleen Blanco sent out an e-mail informing his colleagues that his staff had stopped calling for the buses needed to evacuate people. The aide said he had gotten word from another of Blanco’s staff that the vehicles were no longer needed because FEMA had enough buses on the way and that the military would airlift people from the Superdome.
December 5, 2005
Thousands of documents released by Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco on Friday night shed new light on clashes between state officials, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin and the Bush administration as they struggled to respond to Hurricane Katrina. According to The Washington Post, among the more than 100,000 pages of newly released records are memos showing Blanco frustrated and angered over delays in evacuations and the slow delivery of promised federal aid.
Three months after Hurricane Katrina, political figures in New Orleans talk often of the progress that has been made — trash cleared, homes lighted, money spent. Louisiana, they say, is proving its self-reliance. But hidden behind these sometimes rosy declarations are tens of thousands of their constituents, living at the edge of their dwindling resources, The New York Times reports. Adding to their anxiety is what these citizens describe as a frustrating paper chase through the bureaucracy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The American Red Cross has launched an aggressive effort to reach out to racial and ethnic minorities and add more of them to the charity's vast network of volunteers, in response to criticism that it treated them callously during the hurricane relief effort, according to The Washington Post. More than two months after Katrina and Rita caused tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents to flee their homes for Red Cross shelters, the organization is dealing with complaints that it failed to provide enough translators and overlooked cultural sensitivities. The concerns have been raised by members of Congress and groups representing blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans.
Fears that insurers would turn their backs on victims of the worst U.S hurricane season ever have proved to be mostly unfounded. With property casualty insurance companies facing record payouts of more than $70 billion after Katrina, Rita and Wilma ravaged the Gulf Coast, concerns arose that insurers would come up short in their obligation to policyholders, or even go bankrupt, leaving damage claims unpaid. But Reuters reports that a survey of state regulators, realtors and hurricane victims shows that, in most cases, that insurers get "decent marks." There were some exceptions.
Lost amid continued talk of billions in federal aid to Katrina victims is the fact that most homeowners and businesses are being left to make the toughest calls on their own, the Los Angeles Times reports. Safety nets such as unemployment compensation, employer-provided health care insurance, pensions and, recently, effective disaster relief, have been reeled in or removed. Increasingly, families from the working poor to the affluent are left largely to buy and sell their own way to safety even when their individual efforts seem utterly outgunned, as they do in the case of Katrina.
The Federal Housing Administration is launching a program to pay the mortgages of up to 20,000 victims of Katrina, Rita and Wilma for as much as a year. The Associated Press reports that the unprecedented mortgage relief will be offered to people who own homes with FHA-insured mortgages in designated hurricane-ravaged parts of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
December 2, 2005
Despite written statements to the contrary, in three months the Federal Emergency Management Agency will cease honoring 24,000 year-long leases backed by the city of Houston and signed between hurricane evacuees and local apartment landlords. The Houston Chronicle reports that as a result the city could fail to deliver on a promise made to nearly 100,000 storm-ravaged evacuees from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — a safe roof over their heads for a year. Landlords, who are accepting tenants without a security deposit or credit checks, would be left with scores of families unable to pay their rent.
December 1, 2005
After Katrina hit, many mortgage lenders extended the deadline for repayment or making payment arrangements to Dec. 1 to make life easier on victims, some of whom were jobless and displaced. But The Washington Post reports that as the moratorium on payments comes to an end today, borrowers, lenders and investors holding the notes are heading into uncharted territory, without clear guidance from the government or a historical precedent for what to do next.
At least four people who sought aid as Hurricane Katrina evacuees are actually longtime Colorado residents, according to a broadcast report by Channel 7 News in Denver. According to the Associated Press, 7 News reported that relief agencies are investigating four people for receiving free rent and utilities, furniture, food, clothing and at least $600 from the American Red Cross. The four were among thousands of people seeking aid after the hurricane hit. Many evacuees didn't have IDs after they fled, and relief agencies didn't ask for them in order to expedite aid.
See article on Channel 7 News report
November 30, 2005
Hurricane evacuees could crowd Texas streets unless the federal government steps in soon with a long-term housing solution, according to a report due out Thursday. The San Antonio Express-News says that the report by an Austin-based low-income housing advocacy group calls for congressional hearings on future housing needs and contains sharp criticism of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Among the report's assertions: FEMA has collected too little data on evacuees for local officials to assess needs; temporary housing programs are poorly designed and confusing; and there is no plan for long-term housing and scarce housing resources are being diverted from longtime residents to evacuees.
See San Antonio Express-News article
A Gulf Coast health crisis is emerging as residents struggle with the fouled air, moldy houses and the numbing stress left behind by Katrina, The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports. Across Mississippi and Louisiana, people are suffering with coughs, infections, rashes and broken limbs and they are jittery, tired, depressed and prone to bizarre outbursts, health professionals say.
November 29, 2005
Some 70,000 people in Louisiana and Mississippi are living in trailer parks three months after Hurricane Katrina forced them to abandon their homes, BBC News reports. The cheap, makeshift abodes that are synonymous with poverty in the United States are the only option for many storm evacuees — at least for the next 18 months, while the slow process of rebuilding winds on. But for some they are a step up from the shared motel rooms they inhabited for weeks after the storm.
The tug of war over temporary housing among Katrina evacuees is the latest wrinkle in the lives of more than a quarter of a million displaced people who are trying to start over in new cities. Many are still looking for jobs, a home, and some measure of stability, The Christian Science Monitor reports. A recent survey by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that a third of evacuees who have not returned home remain jobless. In Houston, more than 15,000 are still living out of hotel rooms.
See Christian Science Monitor article
November 28, 2005
Providing medical care is one of the most daunting challenges for a rebuilding New Orleans, and choices made now will determine whether one of the nation's poorest cities can adequately care for its many uninsured citizens, The Washington Post reports. Katrina damaged more than a dozen hospitals and uprooted thousands of private physicians. Nearly three months later, health care remains scarce. The last military medical unit has left, leaving only Touro and Children's hospitals partially reopened.
Of the 413 post-hurricane contracts that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had awarded to Louisiana companies as of Nov. 18, only 125 were worth more than $100,000 and only 50 of those were worth $500,000 or more, according to a Gannett News Service analysis. Of the $3.7 billion FEMA has spent on contracts related to Katrina and Rita, about $201 million — or 5.4 percent — went to Louisiana companies, according to the analysis. The other storm-hit states, Mississippi and Alabama, haven't fared better.
See Gannett News Service article
November 23, 2005
Government at every level — local, state and federal — was unprepared, uncoordinated and overwhelmed in dealing with the Hurricane Katrina disaster, which devastated the Gulf Coast in and killed more than 900 people in New Orleans, Frontline reports. The PBS report examines the chain of decisions that slowed federal response to the calamity in New Orleans, government's failure to protect thousands from a natural disaster that long had been predicted, and the state of America's disaster-response system four years after 9/11.
November 22, 2005
Louisiana officials worry that Congress and the Bush administration are losing interest in their plight less than three months after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, according to a report in The New York Times. They cite an array of stalled bills and policy changes — including measures to finance long-term hurricane protection, revive small businesses and compensate the uninsured — that they say are crucial to rebuilding New Orleans and persuading some of its hundreds of thousands of evacuated residents to return.
Louisiana Sees Faded Urgency in Relief Effort
The whereabouts of 6,644 people reported missing after Hurricane Katrina have not been determined, USA Today reports, raising the prospect that the death toll could be higher than the 1,306 recorded so far in Louisiana and Mississippi, according to two groups working with the federal government to account for victims. Although most of those still unaccounted for probably are alive and well, says an official with the National Center for Missing Adults, an estimated 1,300 of them lived in areas that were heavily damaged by the storm or disabled when it hit.
6,644 are still missing after Katrina; toll may rise
University of Mississippi researchers are gearing up for a study to determine the importance of social ties in helping people rebound from Hurricane Katrina, The (Biloxi) Sun Herald reports. The study is designed to find out if members of social networks — such as a church group — fare better in the recovery process. It will also try to find out if membership in groups post-Katrina helps. The National Science Foundation's $96,000 award funding the project is among 30 grants that have been given to do studies related to Hurricane Katrina.
Study to look at social ties, rebounding from Katrina
November 21, 2005
When the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the American Red Cross reached out helping hands after Hurricane Katrina in Jackson, Miss., tens of thousands of people grabbed on, The New York Times reports. But in giving out $62 million in aid, they both overlooked a critical fact: the storm was hardly catastrophic here, 160 miles from the coast. The only damage sustained by most of the nearly 30,000 households receiving aid was spoiled food. Though most of the money appears to have been given out legally, the U.S. Attorney's office is investigating at least 1,000 reports of fraud, including accusations that people lied about damage or where they lived. State and local officials are criticizing FEMA and the Red Cross as doling out money without safeguards, but they also blame their fellow citizens.
Storm Hit Little, but Aid Flowed to Inland City
The federal government has spent or obligated through contracts more than $18 billion in Katrina relief, meaning that storm recovery costs have already drawn even with the record spending package that the United States has been using to fund Iraq's reconstruction for the past two years, The Washington Post reports. But local, state and federal officials say that number pales in comparison to the ultimate price tag for rebuilding the Gulf Coast; the real big-ticket items, they say, will not come until months and years down the line as the government attempts to recreate a public infrastructure network — including roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, sewers, power lines, ports and levees — that was all but destroyed.
Costliest Part of Gulf Rebuilding Yet to Come
State Farm Insurance Cos. sustained between $8 billion and $9 billion in losses from Hurricane Katrina, a record for an insurer from a single storm, ChicagoBusiness.com reports. Katrina's ultimate impact on State Farm's bottom line will depend on the amount of storm-related claims it can pass on to reinsurers and the federal flood insurance program.
November 18, 2005
Federal and state officials tried yesterday to ease fears that thousands of Louisiana hurricane victims in Texas would be left homeless again after Dec. 1, when FEMA has said it will stop paying their hotel and motel bills, The Associated Press reports. A Department of Homeland Security spokesman said it is working with families to help find them longer-term housing.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.fema18nov18,1,5286810.story
November 17, 2005
Two and a half months after Hurricane Katrina, no public schools are open and nearly an entire generation of New Orleans public school students has vanished, The Washington Post reports. Administrators are struggling to find them, paying for public service ads in far-flung cities and papering evacuee centers with fliers. A school system that served 55,000 students before Katrina's assault on this city has registered only 4,400 for the oft-delayed reopening of five schools in the little-damaged Algiers neighborhood, now scheduled for Dec. 14.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111602345.html
With as much as 80 percent of New Orleans' population still out of town, including most of the black voters who constitute the city's majority, it is not clear whether a municipal election will occur there in February, as scheduled, according to a report in The New York Times. If it does, it will probably be unlike any other in the United States in recent memory and will raise questions of racial fairness. Since Hurricane Katrina, most of the estimated 60,000 to 100,000 people who have returned to New Orleans have been white and middle class, changing the city's racial composition, which had been two-thirds black. Residents who wish to vote will either have to make their way back to town or rely on absentee ballots, a method of voting that has had a checkered record across the nation in recent years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/national/nationalspecial/17politics.html
The federal government has suspended payments on an $80 million contract to an Alabama company that built base camps for emergency workers responding to Hurricane Katrina after auditors reported finding billing and documentation problems, according to a spokeswoman for FEMA, The Washington Post reports. The case is the first in which action was taken on apparent faults in the many contracts federal officials signed, often with little or no competition, in the rush to send aid to the Gulf Coast region.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111602264.html
Hurricane Katrina struck the New Orleans economy so hard that the number of people with jobs in the region will fall to 337,000 next year, less than half the pre-storm level, according to a report released by a team of economists at Louisiana State University, The Times-Picayune reports. The impact will drop the area's employment to a level not seen since 1965 and make room for Baton Rouge as the state's No. 1 metropolitan area, the report says.
http://www.nola.com/business/t-p/index.ssf?/base/money-0/1132214526230470.xml
November 16, 2005
FEMA has warned an estimated 150,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees living in government-subsidized hotels that they have until Dec. 1 to find other housing before it stops paying for their rooms, according to a report in The Washington Post. The announcement effectively starts the clock ticking toward a new exodus of Gulf Coast storm victims who have been living rent-free in 5,700 hotels in 51 states and U.S. territories under the $273 million program.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/15/AR2005111501704.html
Hurricane Katrina has delivered tens of thousands of new children to Texas public schools from evacuee families and many more Medicaid enrollees—making some state officials anxious about the federal government's willingness to absorb those costs in the future, the San Antonio Express-News reports. Texas' lieutenant governor says that he expects the federal government to reimburse all of the hurricane's related costs, but he is concerned about the future costs, which officials say would be about $550 million a year just for public education and Medicaid.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA111605.05B.Hurricanecost.11363196.html
As of Tuesday, the Small Business Administration had approved only 1,082 small-business or economic injury loans to businesses in the hardest-hit areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, while denying 1,946 applications, according to a report in The New York Times. The SBA says 24,542 business-related loan applications are still being processed. Anger at the slow pace spilled over at a hearing last week before the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/business/businessspecial/16olson.html
Insurers, industry veterans and even hedge funds are rushing to start new companies to tap into a surge in catastrophe reinsurance prices that is expected after this year's record hurricane season, MarketWatch reports. Hurricane Katrina probably cost U.S. insurers and reinsurers $34.4 billion, according to the Insurance Services Office, an organization that crunches data for the industry. Less than three months after Katrina struck, 10 budding reinsurers are raising almost $8 billion in new capital, according to SNL Financial, a research firm based in Charlottesville, Va.
November 15, 2005
The unprecedented task of collecting the post-Katrina trash, estimated at 22 million tons for New Orleans alone, is expected to take months, if not years, according to a report by The Christian Science Monitor. That's a real challenge for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees the project for FEMA.
The inner life of a city gets dragged to the curb
FEMA overestimated the cost of Hurricane Katrina-related contracts by 15 percent —$600 million — and its count of contracts by about half because of double counting, the Washington Post reports. The corrections, disclosed in a Department of Homeland Security's inspector general report, are among several findings of suspect or money-wasting FEMA recovery operations.
FEMA Overestimated Cost of Contracts After Katrina
November 10, 2005
Some Hurricane Katrina victims are joining in a class-action suit against FEMA, charging that the agency "failed to fulfill its mandate" to provide them with housing assistance and imposed "retroactively inconsistent rules," The New York Times reports. The complaint alleges that the agency has been inexcusably slow in processing applications and unfairly denies claims. The plaintiffs are suing for immediate assistance rather than seeking damages. Plaintiff Russell Hayward, for example, was sent a $2,358 assistance check, but didn't receive the rules as to how the money could be spent until a week afterward. He was later denied further aid because he hadn't spent the money according to the rules.
Storm Victims Suing FEMA for More Aid
November 8, 2005
FEMA has posted detailed information on the state of emergency housing on its Web site. The agency says that more than 40,000 temporary housing units in the Gulf Coast area are ready for occupancy.
Louisiana Weekly Housing Update
November 7, 2005
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has decided to expedite relief efforts by giving residents of neighborhoods presumed to have been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina $26,200, the maximum award for damages, the Washington Post reports. The determination is being made using satellite imagery rather than individual home inspections. "It is presumed these homes are uninhabitable, and these persons will be eligible for the maximum amount they can receive," said FEMA spokeswoman Nicol Andrews. FEMA has begun notifying 60,000 renters and property owners in Louisiana and Mississippi about the money they will be eligible to receive.
FEMA has approved its first round of Community Disaster Loans to help eight Gulf Coast communities devastated by hurricanes, the agency announced on its Web site. New Orleans was approved for $120 million. A FEMA news release also explains the types of contracts the government agency is involved with and where contracting opportunities lie.
FEMA Puts Victim Needs First When Hiring Contractors
November 4, 2005
Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Army Corps of Engineers in charge of hurricane recovery expenditures told a House committee investigating the government's slow response after Katrina that they are still not sure why some efforts have stalled and local firms are not getting a larger share of the work, and that they must do more research to learn how reconstruction and relief money is being spent, the Washington Post reports.
Katrina Recovery Officials Unsure What's Been Spent
A spokeswoman for Gov. Kathleen Blanco said that Louisiana is not in the financial position to pay the $3.7 billion that federal law says is the state's portion of the hurricane relief effort, USA Today reports. Staffers for the governor "about fell over" Wednesday night when they received the Federal Emergency Management Agency's estimate of the state's costs for hurricanes Katrina and Rita, said a consultant working for Blanco.
Louisiana can't pay Katrina, Rita bills
FEMA's latest report to Congress has been posted online.
Letter to Committee on Appropriations
Disaster Relief Fund Statistics
November 3, 2005
The Advocate also reports that Louisiana legislators studying possible changes to state law were critical of the response times of the Louisiana National Guard and other state entities in wake of Katrina and sought answers while questioning Adjutant General Bennett C. Landreneau, who is also director of the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
Guards' Katrina response questioned
November 2, 2005
Reps. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., and Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspector general to investigate several Operation Blue Roof contracts awarded to provide temporary roofs for homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina, BizNewOrleans.com reports. News reports have suggested the government is paying $2,980 to $3,500 for plastic tarps that should cost about $300; as many as 300,000 homes in Louisiana may need roof repairs. "If contractors are excessively overpaid for the standard commercial value of their work, we've got a problem," said Thompson. "The federal government is wasting taxpayer dollars and it needs to start doing a better job of managing federal contracts."
Congressmen want investigation of 'Operation Blue Roof'
President Bush chose Donald Powell as the administration's point man to deal with Congress, state and local governments, and businesses on hurricane relief matters, the Associated Press reports. He also eventually will take over as coordinator of Gulf Coast recovery efforts. Powell, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., was a large contributor to Bush's presidential campaign and was once appointed chairman of the Texas A&M University System board by Bush.
Bush picks FDIC chair to run Gulf Coast recovery
Relief groups trying to help Hurricane Katrina evacuees say that the Federal Emergency Management Agency's failure to provide them with information on the whereabouts of people displaced by the storm is slowing down their efforts, USA Today reports.
Lack of FEMA data slows relief
November 1, 2005
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco issued wide-ranging 77-item call for a special legislative session in Baton Rouge to be held Nov. 6-22 to deal with hurricane-related problems, The Shreveport Times reports. "This is a substantial package of initiatives that will help our families, our businesses and our state recover from Katrina and Rita," Blanco said. "We will cut spending and restructure government to address a $1 billion drop in state revenues." The package includes legislation to rebuild the New Orleans school system, give tax breaks to citizens and businesses affected by the storms, create a new building code, build stronger levees, improve coastal protection and strengthen ethics laws so that elected officials and their families can't profit from recovery efforts.
Gov. issues broad call for session
Governor's Proclamation No. 62 KBB 2005
Baton Rouge's Advocate reports that Louisiana state Reps. Eric LaFleur, D-Ville Platte, and Don Cazayoux, D-New Roads, have urged the governor to present a proposal in the special session that would require all public officials to report any federal money they receive personally from hurricane relief and recovery efforts.
Two legislators want relief funds disclosed
FEMA has posted detailed information on the state of emergency housing on its Web site. The agency says that the number of Gulf Coast-area temporary housing ready for occupancy is about 36,500 units.
Louisiana Weekly Housing Update
October 31, 2005
Florida's Jacksonville Business Journal reports that four area companies were awarded FEMA relief contracts worth $7.5 million. Suncoast Recreational Vehicle Towable Super Center and Dick Gore's RV World Inc., are providing trailers to house displaced residents, Cell-Tel Government Systems Inc. is building communications infrastructure for FEMA workers and the U.S. Navy's 2nd Fleet at Belle Chasse Naval Air Base, and Ring Power Corp. is providing rental generators to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Local companies land FEMA contracts for Katrina work
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has posted its seventh weekly Hurricane Katrina spending report to the House Appropriations Committee.
Weekly Report on Hurricane Katrina Emergency Supplemental Appropriations
October 28, 2005
Problems continue to plague the FCC's program to provide free cell phones to eligible Hurricane Katrina evacuees, reports the Associated Press. Verizon Wireless is grappling with such matters as how people must prove their eligibility and how to get phones to evacuees who have relocated throughout the country. Some phone companies are still unaware of the program.
FCC OK's free cell phone service, but who's offering it?
October 27, 2005
The Christian Science Monitor looks at the role politics plays in influencing the federal government's response to natural disasters. Researchers who studied federal disaster spending patterns from 1960 to 2003 found, for example, that presidents are more likely to declare disasters in key states during election years and that more money tends to go to states represented by lawmakers serving on committees overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The ties between disaster aid and politics
The Federal Communications Commission issued a disaster recovery order to provide free cell phones and 300 minutes of free calls to about 300,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees, reports the Baton Rouge Advocate. Wireless carriers will be reimbursed $130 for each household, but are not required to participate. Problems have surfaced, though, with some providers that didn't know of the plan besieged by evacuees and some participating companies still struggling to work out the details.
Cell companies unsure how plan for free phones to work
FEMA will give the United Methodist Committee on Relief a $66 million grant to provide services for families displaced by Katrina, according to the New York Times. The grant will be funded by donations from foreign nations. The religious group will lead an alliance of up to a dozen other charities in creating a network of 3,000 relief workers across the United States.
U.S. to Use Religious Charity to Run Storm Relief Project
Bourget's of the South, a custom motorcycle business owned by the father and uncle of Louisiana lawmaker Rep. Gary Smith, was given a $2.4 million FEMA contract to provide travel trailers days after Hurricane Katrina, reports the Baton Rouge Advocate. Competing RV suppliers in the area claim the contract was improperly awarded and have filed complaints with the state.
Suppliers criticize FEMA trailer deal with motorcycle dealer
October 25, 2005
South Dakota officials are investigating the circumstances in which a catering contractor submitted a $97,000 food bill for about 1,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees who were never brought to South Dakota, reports the Associated Press.
Inquiry persists in Katrina food billing
Whitestone Group Inc., of Pickerington, Ohio, was selected by the General Services Administration to provide security services for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in areas affected by Hurricane Katrina, according to Business First of Columbus.
Whitestone Group tapped for Katrina security
October 24, 2005
Murillo Modular Group Ltd. of Lewisville, Tex. received a $7.6 million firm-fixed-price contract to provide portable classroom buildings in Baton Rouge, La., according to Defense Industry Daily. The work is expected to be complete by Nov. 21. This sole source contract was initiated on Oct. 14 by the Recovery Field Office in Baton Rouge.
$7.6M for Portable Classrooms in Baton Rouge, LA
October 21, 2005
Hurricane Katrina has been a boon for Indiana, with companies based in the state landing about a fourth of the $2.3 billion in federal construction contracts awarded so far, reports the Indianapolis Star. Most of that has gone to the Gulf Stream Coach Inc., which won a $521 million contract to provide temporary housing for hurricane victims. Critics have noted that Gulf Stream founder James F. Shea and his family have contributed more than $20,000 to Republican candidates, including President Bush.
State firms land $586M in Katrina FEMA contracts
USA Today also reports that the Government Accountability Office is examining a no-bid $39.5 million contract to provide portable classrooms awarded to Akima Site Operations, an Alaskan firm that includes native-owned companies as its corporate parents. Critics claim the units could have been obtained at roughly half the price.
Contract for portable classrooms scrutinized
Rep. Henry Waxman has called on federal officials to explain their $236 million deal with Carnival Cruise Lines to provide three cruise ships for post-Hurricane Katrina housing, newspapers report. Waxman on Thursday asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to provide documents showing how the contract cost was calculated. Lawmakers from both parties criticized the deal as wasteful, but Waxman's critique is the first to offer specific data about the finances underlying the deal.
Lawmaker makes waves over cruise-ship housing
Congressman faults Carnival's lucrative contract for hurricane housing
The New York Times reports that Louisiana officials are engaging in a concerted effort to account for every penny of the federal Hurricane Katrina aid the state receives and spends. Gov. Kathleen Blanco promised a skeptical Congress on Tuesday that steps would be taken to make the state's financial affairs as honest and open as possible. The state is hiring layers of accountants and consultants and will submit all money requests to the state auditor or inspector general.
Louisiana Tries to Show It Is Handling Its Relief Money Honestly
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers submitted to Congress its sixth weekly report on Hurricane Katrina-related reconstruction expenditures.
Army Corps of Engineers report to the House Appropriations Committee
October 20, 2005
The Associated Press lists the 10 largest contracts awarded by the government for cleanup and recovery after Hurricane Katrina. The top five each have values of $500 million or more. All 10 were awarded to companies based outside of the affected region.
A look at the 10 largest contracts for Katrina cleanup
The Associated Press follows up on its list of the 10 largest Katrina contracts, finding political connections to be a common theme among the winners.
Katrina's big contracts go to political loop
Government watchdog groups believe that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is not doing an adequate job of explaining how it's handing out billions of dollars in Hurricane Katrina recovery contracts, reports the Mobile Register. For example, if members of the general public or the media want a copy of a contract, FEMA requires that they submit requests through the Freedom of Information Act—a process that at a minimum can take several weeks. FEMA also will not release any assessments of how a contractor is performing under a particular contract.
FEMA is spending billions, providing little information
This week, FEMA announced that when awarding hurricane relief contracts it will look first to small, disadvantaged and local businesses in the Gulf Coast region, reports the Federal Times. The announcement came amid criticism that FEMA is shutting out small businesses in awarding Katrina-related contracts. It also comes just a few days after the Homeland Security Department announced new competitions for four contracts that had been awarded on a noncompetitive basis to Bechtel Corp., Fluor Corp., CH2M Hill and the Shaw Group.
Small businesses rise to top of FEMA contract priority list
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards today. The total spent on post-Katrina contracts stands at $354 million (most FEMA and Defense Department contracts are not included).
October 19, 2005
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin on Tuesday told congressional subcommittees looking at rebuilding strategies that federal Hurricane Katrina recovery aid will not be wasted or mismanaged by the city and state, reports the Times-Picayune. Blanco said that in addition to a team of its own auditors, the state will hire a "Big Four" accounting firm to review all Katrina-related expenditures and will retain a second Big Four firm to evaluate those findings.
La. will be honest, panel is told
October 18, 2005
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards today. The total spent on post-Katrina contracts stands at $350 million (most FEMA and Defense Department contracts are not included). According to the database, the four companies that have received the biggest single contracts (ranging from $15.9 million to $50 million) are: Clearbrook LLC, AmeriCold Logistics LLC, Asset Group, Inc. and Motorola.
October 17, 2005
Last Friday, the Associated Press reported that $347 million was being spent with little or no competition, despite a FEMA pledge to reopen such agreements.
FEMA still spending on limited competition contracts
The New York Times dissected some $19 million in purchase-card spending for hurricane relief in its Saturday editions. Some highlights include $271,838 in total spent on medical supplies (carved up into three segments to fall below a spending cap), $382,162 spent at Office Depot stores and $223,000 for flip-flops for evacuees.
Federal Agencies Often Paid Retail for Hurricane Aid
The Shaw Group has been contracted by FEMA to run shelters in San Antonio, according to the local Express-News. The newspaper takes a look at the company's hurricane relief awards.
No-bid shelter contracts to be reopened
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco has requested that FEMA institute rules to secure more contracts to local-area businesses according to a report posted on BayouBuzz.com.
Louisiana Governor Blanco Requests FEMA To Use Locals As Prime Contractors
Most evacuees had moved out of emergency shelters by Saturday, according to the Associated Press, which reports that some 600,000 people have been placed in hotels at a cost that could reach $425 million by next Saturday.
Most Katrina shelters cleared but housing problems remain
The Miami Herald reports that $7,500 or more in daily fees are helping to keep the Alabama Cruise Terminal in Mobile afloat. It is the home port and current location for Carnival Cruise Lines' the one of three Carnival ships housing evacuees under a $236 million contract with FEMA. The Holiday is slated to move to Mississippi, the home state for most of its estimated 1,400 passengers.
Mobile to bill FEMA for lost revenue on evacuee ship
McGraw-Hill Construction takes a look at four $100 million FEMA contracts for evacuee housing awarded to Fluor, Bechtel, Shaw Group and CH2M Hill, and reports that agency officials say FEMA "always intended to renegotiate."
FEMA Explains Early Contracts After Director's Senate Grilling
A Louisiana Daily Advertiser guest editorial criticizes the lack of contract awards to local businesses.
Guest Editorial: Contacts mean contracts for storm cleanup
The New York Times recounts a tour of trash piles in New Orleans, where contractors hauling away garbage could be kept busy from seven months to two years.
In New Orleans, the Trashman Will Have to Move Mountains
October 14, 2005
An article by the Center for Responsive Politics analyzes the political ties of some of the companies that have won the bulkiest Hurricane Katrina-related contracts. Among them:
- More than 86 percent of the federal contributions by employees of Florida-based AshBritt Environmental since 1999 have been to Republican candidates. Federal investigators are looking into a $568 million Katrina contract for debris removal awarded to the company by the Army Corps of Engineers.
- Two other companies that got big Katrina contracts, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root and Shaw Environmental, are represented by lobbyist Joe Allbaugh, a former Bush administration FEMA director who also served as George W. Bush's gubernatorial chief of staff in Texas.
- About 60 percent of Carnival Cruise Lines employees' political contributions since 1999 have landed in Republican pockets. The company got a $236 million contract to house Katrina evacuees aboard three of its ships.
AshBritt Environmental's debris removal contract, now under scrutiny by federal investigators, comes as little surprise if one examines the company's record for getting government business. An investigation by the The Sun-Sentinel newspaper finds that Randal Perkins, a Republican Party contributor who runs the company, aggressively lobbied the office of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in 2004 seeking state business during the hurricane season. Records show that then-state Transportation Secretary Jose Abreu complained with the governor about AshBritt's lobbying blitz.
Aggressive lobbying by Pompano alarmed adviser to Gov. Bush
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Web site has been updated with additional data on Katrina contracts and the corps’ weekly report to Congress on Katrina expenditures.
Army Corps of Engineers Katrina contracts
Army Corps of Engineers report to the House Appropriations Committee
Army Corps of Engineers report to the House Appropriations Committee
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards yesterday. The total spent on Post-Katrina contracts stands at $345 million (most FEMA and Defense Department contracts are not included). According to the database, the four companies that have received the biggest single contracts (ranging from $15 million to $50 million) are: AmeriCold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc. and Motorola.
Louisiana Sen. Mary L. Landrieu offers highlights of the $250 billion Hurricane Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act, which she co-sponsored. Expenditures include: $10 million for affected alligator farms in Louisiana, $34 million to study the damage to the state's forestry and $150 million for a historic preservation grant program.
Katrina Disaster Relief and Economic Recovery Act
October 13, 2005
Need a Katrina contract from FEMA? Hire James Lee Witt, the agency's former head during the Clinton administration. The former federal official-turned-disaster consultant/lobbyist helped Atlanta-based AmeriCold Logistics win contracts worth up to $85 million for work related to Katrina and other 2005 storms, USA Today reports. Witt has also been hired as a consultant by clients that include the state of Louisiana.
Ex-FEMA chief's client won contract
USA Today examines some of the federal regulations that the government waived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to speed up the recovery effort. But critics and watchdog groups fear that the very measures that some federal officials think of as a means to increase efficiency are a dangerous rollback of federal protections. The moves in question include the Labor Department lifting affirmative action requirements for companies hired on reconstruction work, the Transportation Department allowing no-bid contracts until Dec. 1 on restoration projects, and President Bush waiving a law in parts of the four states most affected by Katrina that requires workers on federal construction projects to receive the prevailing or average minimum wage.
Some federal rules waived after Katrina
The New York Times reports on the troubled FEMA program for housing Hurricane Katrina evacuees. As of Tuesday, nearly 600,000 people were living in hotel rooms across the country at a daily cost of $11 million paid for by the federal government. Meanwhile, FEMA has only delivered 7,308 travel trailers of the 300,000 it told Congress it would acquire for about $2 billion.
$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief
Three Fairfax, Va., nonprofits have received a combined $276,400 in contracts to coordinate assistance for the estimated 1,500 Katrina evacuees living in Fairfax County, The Washington Post reports. The groups are working on finding jobs and housing for hurricane victims as well as schooling for their children.
3 Groups Get Contract to Aid Storm Victims
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards yesterday. The total spent on Post-Katrina contracts stands at $333 million (most FEMA and Defense Department contracts are not included). According to the database, the four companies that have received the biggest single contracts (ranging from $15 million to $50 million) are: AmeriCold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc. and Motorola.
A memo offers the Department of Transportation inspector general's plan to prevent fraud and waste during Katrina's reconstruction work.
DoT Inspector General memorandum
October 12, 2005
Several of FEMA's housing initiatives—including an $8.3 million-a-day prolonged hotel stay program, the costly and polemic deal to use luxury cruise ships and a one-time disbursement plan that soon could leave evacuees short of rent money and facing eviction—have come under fire, The Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, the number of evacuees who will need extended housing assistance has gone up to about 500,000 people from the original estimate of 300,000.
Housing Aid Called Too Much, Too Little
Inspectors general from several agencies and officials from the Government Accountability Office told a House subcommittee that they will conduct several audits to prevent fraud and waste in spending on Katrina-related contracts, the Associated Press reports. The announcements came as a number of bills aimed at assuring accountability in the Gulf Coast reconstruction process also are pending in Congress.
Government auditors pledge to investigate Katrina contracts
A day after federal officials vowed that they will give preference to local businesses in the contracting process, USA Today reports that a Department of Homeland Security business liaison tasked with helping local businesses resigned in frustration last week because he couldn't secure catering contracts for Louisiana vendors. DHS officials said the ex-official's proposal "skirted around" ruled of the process.
Louisianans get few post-Katrina contracts
As President Bush toured the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast again yesterday, Rep. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana told CNN that he planned to meet with Bush to discuss cutting through FEMA red tape. The Republican said that local businesses do not expect favoritism in the contracting process, just a fair chance to compete and to show that they can be cost-effective.
Lawmaker to Bush: Help cut Katrina red tape
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg and Sen. Edward Kennedy introduced a bill calling for the creation of a new agency that would lead in the estimated $200 billion Gulf Coast reconstruction effort, The Wall Street Journal reports. The idea of having centralized oversight of expenditures is popular among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill, but the White House has not backed the initiative yet.
Bill Would Create 'Czar' For Katrina Reconstruction (subscription)
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards today. The total spent on Post-Katrina contracts stands at $326 million (most FEMA and Defense Department contracts are not included). According to the database, the four companies that have received the biggest single contracts (ranging from $15 million to $50 million) are: AmeriCold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc. and Motorola.
In response to accusations of cronyism in the awarding of contracts, the federal government announced yesterday the creation of the Department of Commerce Hurricane Contracting Information Center to help U.S. businesses, especially minority- and women-owned companies, be better informed about contracting opportunities. The center includes a Web site where businesses can register with government agencies providing reconstruction and relief work.
Department of Commerce Hurricane Contracting Information Center
October 11, 2005
Having shouldered strong criticism for awarding no-bid contracts to large, well-connected companies, FEMA officials guaranteed yesterday that firms run by women, minorities and the disabled will be given part of the Katrina reconstruction work, The Washington Post reports. FEMA also said that local companies will be given preference in the new competitive contracting process.
FEMA to reserve contracts for disadvantaged companies
While FEMA promises to be more inclusive in its contracting process, stories by WLBT of Jackson, Miss., and U.S. News & World Reports show that local minority-owned businesses are not yet seeing results on the ground.
Key advisors to Louisiana's senators, who drafted federal legislation to fund rebuilding the Gulf Coast, were lobbyists representing energy, transportation and other special interests, an investigation by the Los Angeles Times shows. The Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act, introduced last month by Democrat Mary L. Landrieu and Republican David Vitter has a price tag of about $250 billion.
Lobbyists Advise Katrina Relief
FEMA's failure to have a plan to pick up bodies of those who died after Hurricane Katrina hit and the "bureaucratic quagmire" bemoaned by the company it finally hired illustrate a pattern of breakdowns in the agency's relationship with the private sector.
Lack of Contracts Hampered FEMA
Disaster consulting firm Witt Associates is advising the governor of Louisiana on recovery efforts, helping employees of a Mississippi company whose casino was destroyed by the hurricane, and aiding New York client Allstate Corp. in pushing for the creation of a catastrophe fund that will ease the burden on disaster insurers. According to The New York Times, what has kept the consulting shop busy post-Katrina is its owner, James Lee Witt, who was director of FEMA during the Clinton administration. Witt, said to be one of the savviest, and best-connected, professionals in the country on disaster relief matters, says that he is not profiting from the devastation in the Gulf Coast.
FEMA director under Clinton profits from experience
"Follow the money" is the most obvious step in government and corporate accountability. Yet with Katrina contracts the rule may prove difficult to apply. The government databases tracking post-Katrina contracts are incomplete and sporadic, the Associated Press reports. And the law does not require the government to disclose no-bid contracts.
Tracking Katrina money is not easy
To FEMA, the $236 million contract with Carnival Cruise Line to house Katrina victims aboard ships is an example of dealing with disasters in creative ways. To critics and watchdog groups, the deal is a paradigm of waste of federal funds. Today, the Houston Chronicle reports that the shipboard stay for a family costs more than the average house value in New Orleans.
Tab for using cruise vessels as Katrina housing criticized
As the United States faces its biggest recovery effort ever, public officials, private contractors, Congress and the media should play a role in assuring that federal funds are well-spent, an opinion piece in Washington Technology suggests.
Buy Lines: Katrina projects give procurement teams a chance to shine
FEMA says it has granted about $2 billion to a million people displaced by Katrina through its "expedite assistance" program, a no-strings-attached $2,000 payment to those hurricane victims. MSNBC reports that some evacuees fell through the cracks of the system and, thus, were denied the aid. Problems range from faulty computer programs that duplicated applications to confusion regarding qualification requirements.
FEMA's latest report (Oct. 6) to Congress on Katrina-related expenditures has been posted online.
FEMA report to the House Appropriations Committee
October 7, 2005
In today's editions, newspapers analyze the implications of the announcement by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's director that the agency will rebid Katrina-related contracts with a combined worth of $400 million that had been awarded with limited or no competition. Highlights include:
- The contracts up for rebids were awarded to four companies specializing in construction, consulting and engineering: the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La., Fluor Corporation of Aliso Viejo, Calif., Bechtel National of San Francisco and CH2M Hill of Denver. They have long-benefited from government contracts, and some employ lobbyists or executives with close ties to the White House and the Republican Party. The New York Times reports that the Shaw Group's lobbyist, Joe M. Allbaugh, is a former FEMA director and a friend of President Bush.
- The actual impact of the decision to rebid contracts could prove limited. FEMA doesn't plan to have competition for other Katrina deals, and the Army Corps of Engineers has not expressed intention to revise its own no-bid contracts.
- The Los Angeles Times says that FEMA Acting Director David Paulison could not answer how many contracts have been awarded with limited or no competition.
Katrina Contracts Will Be Reopened
In Shift, FEMA Will Seek Bids for Gulf Work
FEMA Reopening Its No-Bid Contracts
In Shift, FEMA Will Seek Bids for Gulf Work
FEMA Reopening Its No-Bid Contracts
Gulf Stream Coach, an Indiana company that in recent years made contributions primarily to Republican candidates, was awarded two contracts worth $521 million to provide trailers to displaced Katrina victims, Bloomberg.com reports. The contracts were won under limited competition, meaning that only up to five firms are allowed to compete for them.
Gulf Stream, Donor to Republicans, Wins Hurricane Housing Order
At a Senate committee hearing Thursday, FEMA's acting director testified on the agency's housing assistance efforts and long-term rebuilding. Acknowledging that many "are rightfully concerned about the costs," David Paulison sought to clarify the agency's contracting procedures.
David Paulison's testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee
In remarks offered before the FEMA chief's testimony, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said that the agency's no-bid contracts have "created opportunities for fraud, waste and abuse."
Sen. Joseph Lieberman's statement
Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Richard L. Skinner appeared Thursday before two House committees to explain the oversight plan for Katrina expenditures.
Testimony of DHS Inspector General
While public officials and legislators bump heads over Katrina's recovery efforts, an AP-Ipsos poll found that 60 percent of Americans surveyed said they doubt that money will be spent wisely.
AP-Ipsos poll: Public losing confidence in storm relief spending
A Chicago Tribune editorial discusses several congressional initiatives aimed at strengthening oversight of Katrina-related expenditures.
For an honest rebuilding effort
Top government officials who managed U.S. reconstruction projects in Iraq have been hired by some of the giant construction companies that got deals in Iraq and now are profiting from Katrina, Reuters says. Some have obtained positions with Shaw Group Inc., Bechtel National Inc., and Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root. The Center for Public Integrity did an exhaustive investigation of Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction contracts in its 2004 project Windfalls of War.
Katrina work goes to officials who led Iraq effort
While Republican legislators are pushing for an across-the-board spending cut in Gulf Coast recovery efforts, Louisiana state officials are requesting $1 billion in federal funds to repair roads in the Baton Rouge area. The proposal is aimed at easing traffic problems caused by Hurricane Katrina damage.
Republicans in Congress Seek Budget Cuts for Storm Relief
Congress' top budget analyst said Thursday that the total cost for rebuilding the Katrina-hit areas could be close $150 billion instead of the estimated $200 billion or more that was pitched originally, the Associated Press reports.
Newspaper articles discuss the Red Cross program that houses displaced Katrina victims in hotels around the country. The initiative has cost $112 million so far and has boosted hotel profits. However, some evacuees are finding it hard to find vacancies and some hotel chains are finding that sheltering evacuees makes it difficult to honor prior reservations.
Hurricane Evacuees Boost Hotels' Profits
Hotel chain asks Katrina evacuees to leave
October 6, 2005
In the midst of increasing concerns about cronyism and abusive spending, FEMA chief R. David Paulison said today that the disaster relief agency will rebid several Katrina-related contracts that were awarded with little or no competition, according to news service reports. More than 80 percent of the $1.5 billion in contracts that have been awarded by the agency so far fall into this category.
FEMA to Hold Re-Bid on Katrina Contracts
Hurricane contracts to be rebid - U.S. official
FEMA has stopped taking new applicants for a program that has housed about 6,000 Louisiana workers in nearly 2,400 travel trailers at refineries and other industrial sites across the storm-ravaged state, The Wall Street Journal reports. Angry Louisiana officials argue that the effort, aimed at restarting work key businesses, is one of the few that has effectively gotten evacuees into temporary shelter and back into the local work force.
Agency cancels a housing plan for evacuees (subscription)
Another WSJ article reports that FEMA has filled only a small portion of the thousands of requests for temporary housing in the Gulf Coast. The disaster relief agency has ordered 125,000 trailers and mobile homes, but said that only about 6,200 were ready to be occupied. Gulf Coast area officials complain that they have received only a few hundred so far.
FEMA's Next Crisis (subscription)
In Mississippi, MSNBC reports, the federal government is being criticized by some for overspending on no-bid contracts for portable classrooms and provisional roofs.
Critics question no-bid Katrina contracts
An opinion piece in the South-Florida Sun Sentinel discusses the potential dangers of relaxing spending restrictions and regulations in the aftermath of large-scale disasters.
When winds die, it starts raining money
With the bulk of reconstruction contracts so far given to out-of-state firms, Louisiana's larger general contractors are concerned that they will be shut out of the key rebuilding jobs in the state, an article in The Shreveport Times says. Meanwhile, smaller contractors are concerned about the influx of their peers from other states because of expedited licensing.
Reconstruction needs to involve Louisiana contractors
As private companies hurry to get their share of federal contracts, a USA Today article analyzes some of the challenges in the "biggest home-rebuilding effort in recent U.S. history": financing, environment, and race and poverty.
Rebuilding after Katrina to take monumental effort
New Orleans' Times-Picayune says that debris removal in the city, contracted to be done by Tennessee-based Phillips & Jordan by the Corps of Engineers, may take years.
Cleanup crews clamor for share of big haul Drop
A Department of Homeland Security inspector general's report says that FEMA's computer systems were antiquated and slow, thus limiting the agency's effectiveness in responding to the 2004 hurricane season.
Computer systems at FEMA were lacking in 2004, says IG
October 5, 2005
The Los Angeles Times reports that a controversial six-month, $192 million government contract with Carnival Cruise Lines for post-Katrina emergency housing includes more company-friendly benefits than originally disclosed. Lawmakers from both parties have called for an investigation of the deal. Carnival has agreed to refund the government for any profits beyond those agreed to in the contract.
Under the Waterline of Cruise Ship Deal
Only 1.5 percent of the $1.6 billion awarded by FEMA so far for reconstruction and relief contracts has gone to minority-owned businesses, The Associated Press reports. To speed up the contracting process, Congress and the Bush Administration waived some rules normally attached to government contracting, including affirmative action regulations.
Minority firms getting few Katrina pacts
According to the Department of Homeland Security, the four largest single contracts FEMA awarded for post-Katrina work total more than $1 billion and were given out on a limited competition basis . The beneficiaries are Circle B. Enterprises Inc., Gulf Stream Coach Inc., which received two of the contracts, and Morgan Building & Spas Inc.
DHS Hurricane Katrina Contracts
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards yesterday. Post-Katrina contracts total $303 million (the data don't currently include most FEMA or DOD contracts). According to the database, the four companies which have received the biggest single contracts ($15 to $50 million) are: Americold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc. and Motorola.
FPDS Hurricane Katrina Contracts
Corporate Watch—an organization that investigates "multinationals that profit out of war, fraud, environmental and human rights abuse"—notes that some of the same well-connected firms that got the biggest contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq are now benefiting from Katrina's recovery effort.
Big, Easy Iraqi-Style Contracts Flood New Orleans
Former President Bill Clinton said yesterday in Baton Rouge that FEMA should hire more local companies and workers to rebuild the hurricane-hit areas, the Shreveport Times reports.
Clinton to FEMA: Hire La. companies, workers
In an op-ed for The Seattle Times, Rep. Adam Smith, D-Was., says that Congress should enact a commission, similar to the Truman Commission of World War II, to ensure proper oversight of Katrina-recovery spending.
Federal relief efforts a fiscal disaster
While the Department of Homeland Security announced this week that it will create a procurement control board to oversee Katrina-recovery expenditures, some legislators say the government's initiative is inadequate.
Congress seeks to codify post-Katrina contracting restrictions
The FBI is investigating four Red Cross contract workers who allegedly funneled Katrina relief funds to friends and relatives.
Arrests Made in Alleged Katrina Scheme
October 4, 2005
Despite government claims that it is trying to funnel contracts to small Gulf Coast companies, an investigation by The Washington Post shows that more than 90 percent of the money spent so far has gone to firms outside the states most affected by Hurricane Katrina.
Gulf Firms Losing Cleanup Contracts
Another Washington Post article reports that the company with the biggest FEMA relief contract so far, Circle B Enterprises, doesn't have a license to build manufactured housing in its home state, Georgia. The firm has been awarded a $287.5 million contract to build temporary housing for Katrina victims.
FEMA Contractor Lacks Building License
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards yesterday. Post-Katrina contracts total $297 million (the data don't currently include most FEMA or DOD contracts). According to the database, the four companies which have received the biggest single contracts ($15 to $50 million) are: Americold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc. and Motorola.
As questions on Katrina-related contracts continue to arise, FEMA is also under fire for failing to disclose how it spent taxpayers' money after four hurricanes raked Florida in 2004. Three newspapers sued the agency when it refused to provide the pay-out records for the $5.3 billion that were awarded in after-storm contracts.
Newspapers seek access to FEMA files
The Washington Post reports that the Office of Management and Budget terminated a new rule that increased the amount a federal employee could charge to government credit cards to $250,000 in expenditures related to Hurricane Katrina relief. Watchdog groups had warned that the rule could lead to fraud and abusive spending.
OMB Rescinds Katrina-Related Increase in Card Limits
The Advocate reports that the U.S. Corps of Engineers will oversee the removal of debris in St. Landry areas and municipalities. Members of St. Landry Parish Council want to make sure that parish contractors will be first in line for the job.
St. Landry OKs corps to oversee debris removal
October 3, 2005
One particularly costly FEMA effort has been even less than cold comfort in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The New York Times reports that the agency bought 182 million pounds of ice cubes—far more than could be delivered to aid storm victims. About 60 percent of the ice ended up in various storage facilities nationwide after truckers transported it on circuitous routes around the country for days. The cost to taxpayers: more than $100 million.
Stumbling Storm-Aid Effort Put Tons of Ice on Trips to Nowhere
A U.S. News & World Reports article analyzes the challenges faced by the inspectors general of several federal agencies as they try make sense of Katrina-related contracts.
A Federal Times article looks at the government's poor reporting of Katrina contracting activity.
Katrina contracts leave incomplete, inaccurate audit trail
Newsday reports that while FEMA has spent more than $1 billion on trailers to house evacuees, only 105 Louisiana families have received the promised units:
A New York Times editorial criticizes the Department of Labor's decision to relieve new federal contractors of the obligation to have an affirmative action plan for Katrina-related projects:
The Department of Labor has issued a memorandum that suspends affirmative action requirements in the contracting process for post-Katrina projects.
http://www.dol.gov/esa/ofccp/pdf/Katrina1.pdf 
On Friday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released its weekly report on the Hurricane Katrina Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill.
http://www.usace.army.mil/transcripts/KatrinaRpt_SAB_092905.pdf
September 30, 2005
Questions and concerns grew in Washington today about the hurricane relief process, with questions being raised on Capitol Hill about contracts for repairing roofs, housing evacuees, restoring education and providing other services for the Gulf Coast victims of Katrina and Rita.
The Federal Procurement Data System posted its latest information on hurricane-related contract awards today, including roughly $271 million for Katrina efforts. A quick run-through of the information—which does not include unreported contracts by FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers and other agencies—reveals that roughly $236 million in aid is flowing through pre-established government purchasing agreements from the General Services Administration. Some $60 million in contracts appear to be have awarded with less-than-full competition. More than half of the reported amount, roughly $167.7 million in contracts appears to have gone to just five companies: Americold Logistics LLC, Clearbrook LLC, Asset Group Inc., Motorola, and East Alabama Portables.
Hurricane Katrina Contracts
Hurricane Rita Contracts
The New York Times reports that questions are being raised about FEMA's sluggish progress in housing displaced families despite its huge temporary housing contract awards.
Housing for Storm's Evacuees Lagging Far Behind U.S. Goals
Greece's offer of the free use of ships for evacuee housing was turned down and instead FEMA signed a $236 million contract with Carnival Cruise Lines. Sens. Barack Obama and Tom Coburn are asking Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff why the Greek offer wasn't accepted.
See Chicago Tribune article: Senators ask why U.S. paying when free ships offered
See USA Today article: Carnival CEO defends cruise ship deal for hurricane evacuees
Senators want cruise ship deal explained
Knight Ridder reports that contractors, including the Shaw Group, are charging government as much as 10 times the normal rate to cover roofs with temporary tarps and perform other roofing repairs:
U.S. paying a premium to cover storm-damaged roofs
Rep. Bennie Thompson says that the government is paying more than twice what it should for temporary classrooms in a $39.5 million no-bid contract awarded under special provisions to Akima Site Operations, and Alaska Native company that is a subsidiary of NANA Regional Corp. NANA Regional Corp. and its subsidiary NANA Pacific LLC have been profiled in previous Center for Public Integrity reports.
Mississippi Classroom Contract Questioned
Alaska firm gets Gulf rebuilding job
Alaska firm gets Gulf rebuilding job
The Wall Street Journal has more on how former FEMA officials Joseph Allbaugh and James Lee Witt are using their influence on behalf of clients:
Connections Are Key to Contracts for Katrina Aid (subscription required)
Reporting more on hotels in New Orleans, the Los Angeles Times says that FEMA has booked 20,000 hotel rooms:
New Orleans' Tourist Business Dealing With the Big Difficult
September 29, 2005
Following up on yesterday's congressional hearings, several publications report on the testimony of several agency inspector generals, including that of the Department of Homeland Security's Richard Skinner, who told Congress that he was concerned over the award of several no-bid contracts.
No-Bid Contracts To Get Close Look
Katrina contracts worth billions raise worries about waste
Katrina contracts worth billions raise worries about waste
Homeland Security's chief oversight official also told representatives yesterday that the initial $15 million allotment was insufficient to police Katrina contracts and that more funds would be needed:
Homeland Security to request additional funds for Katrina oversight
The Government Accountability Office has posted testimony and highlights from yesterday's hearings on its Web site.
Koch Membrane Systems, a subsidiary of conservative patron Koch Industries, is helping FEMA and the military purify water in Biloxi, Miss. The Center for Public Integrity's reporting on Koch and the oil industry was among the winners announced at the Society of Environmental Journalists award ceremony last night.
Gulf storms put Koch's water filters to the test
Center for Public Integrity "Politics of Oil" report: Koch's Low Profile Belies Political Power
Winners: SEJ 4th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment
The Chicago Tribune reports this morning that Chicago-based CredentialSmart is backgrounding doctors and other health providers for the Department of Health and Human Services for an undisclosed sum:
Chicago firm helps check out Gulf Coast volunteers
NPR, using FEMA documents, details how the unprepared agency had to scramble for supplies at taxpayer expense after Katrina struck:
FEMA Accounts Reveal Last-Minute Scramble for Supplies
Homeland Security's inspector general released a report yesterday indicating that FEMA's former head Michael Brown was warned of agency shortcomings prior to Katrina, contradicting Brown's Tuesday congressional testimony:
FEMA's Brown was warned early of shortages
Government Executive has more on FEMA's unraveling in the last few years:
FEMA's decline: an agency's slow slide from grace
Several publications report on the scramble for aid among Gulf Coast state officials, lobbyists and contractors, including Government Executive's report on Monday's Washington, D.C.-area Katrina Reconstruction Summit.
See Associated Press article: Gulf Coast governors press Congress for aid
See Wall Street Journal article: Katrina Galvanizes Lobbyists As Costly Rebuilding Begins (subscription required)
See Government Executive article: Officials fear contracting abuses in wake of Hurricane Katrina
Katrina Galvanizes Lobbyists As Costly Rebuilding Begins (subscription required)
Officials fear contracting abuses in wake of Hurricane Katrina
NPR reports more criticism of government plans to reimburse religious groups, while the White House promises that evangelizing will not be funded:
Faith-Based Groups to Receive Katrina Funds
September 28, 2005
Few Katrina-related contracts were announced today. News coverage focused on the grilling of former Federal Emergency Management chief Michael Brown in yesterday's congressional hearings and the resignation of New Orleans' police chief. News organizations continued to look into existing contracts, especially the awarding of one worth a potential $236 million to Carnival Cruise Lines and a $568 million award to Ashbritt, client of the former firm of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. Government auditors from several agencies have promised Congress that no-bid contracts and purchases on government credit-cards will be investigated.
See Associated Press article: Government auditors to probe Katrina deals
See Washington Post article: $236 Million Cruise Ship Deal Criticized
The Washington Post looks into complaints about the Carnival award:
$236 Million Cruise Ship Deal Criticized
While visiting Miami, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff indicated that Katrina-related contracts could be canceled or payments withheld if the deals did not measure up. However, he avoided responding to questions regarding former FEMA head Michael Brown's testimony as to whether federal, state or local authorities were to blame for the poor response to Katrina.
In Miami, Chertoff sidesteps questions about response to Katrina
The post-Katrina lobbying blitz among prospective contractors is picking up speed, according to newspaper reports.
See Washington Post article: Lobbies Line Up For Relief Riches
See Wall Street Journal article: Industries Angle for Share in Relief Package (subscription required)
Industries Angle for Share in Relief Package (subscription required)
September 27, 2005
Michael Brown is back at the Federal Emergency Management Agency working as a consultant to the agency he was recently forced out of, according to news reports. Newspaper editorials also criticize the coziness of relationships between those giving and receiving contracts, following up on yesterday's New York Times article that reported that many awards were granted without full competition.
See CNN article: Brown serving as consultant to FEMA
See New York Times article: Cronies at the Till
See USA Today article: No-bid storm contracts prompt warnings
No-bid storm contracts prompt warnings
Several government agencies and divisions have posted downloadable reports on contracts awarded through last Friday, although some of the most expensive, controversial contracts, including the more than $500 million Ashbritt award, are not listed:
Federal Government Procurement System - Excel File
Army Corps of Engineers
The Washington Post reports that FEMA plans to compensate some religious groups for the expenses incurred in Katrina relief efforts. Critics contend the action may be an unconstitutional breach of the wall between church and state.
FEMA Plans to Reimburse Faith Groups for Aid
September 26, 2005
Today's must-read Katrina-related story is the New York Times' detailed analysis of contract awards. The Times reports that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has awarded more than $1 billion in contracts with little or no competition. The Homeland Security inspector general raises concerns about how some of the contracts were awarded.
Many Contracts for Storm Work Raise Questions
Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times reported on the criticism of Carnival Cruise Lines' $236 million deal to house evacuees on ships. The article included Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman's letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calling for more information on the contract.
Ships' Housing Deal Is Under Scrutiny
FEMA has allowed its reserve workforce to dwindle in favor of hiring less effective contract workers, according to the Washington Post, which also reports on Louisiana's drive to snare more federal aid:
FEMA Let Reserves Wither, Hurting Response, Some Say
Louisiana Goes After Federal Billions
Louisiana Goes After Federal Billions
September 23, 2005
While some contract awards surfaced today and yesterday, most major announcements and reporting have been shunted aside as the Gulf Coast prepares for the expected onslaught of Hurricane Rita.
The Dallas Morning News reports on FEMA's mismanagement of relief funds in a story replete with mentions and new details about contracted companies, including Circle B Enterprises, Gulfstream Coach, Integrated Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, Landstar System Inc. and Morgan Buildings, Spas & Pools:
After the storm, FEMA accused of wastefulness
The Associated Press reports that government auditors are questioning open-ended contracts to Halliburton and other subsidiaries:
Auditors targeting open-ended Katrina contracts
Minorities say they've been shut out of contracting opportunities, according to the Wall Street Journal, which has a rundown of regulatory changes:
Minorities Say Katrina Work Flows to Others (subscription required)
In the days before Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, local, state and federal officials held a series of telephone conference calls aimed at coordinating their responses to the storm. The sessions were recorded by Walter Maestri, emergency manager for Jefferson Parish, who shared them with National Public Radio. In tapes of the disaster planning meetings, NPR reportds that emergency managers and civic officials evinced a growing concern with the strengthening hurricane's possible effects, and after the storm made landfall, a growing frustration with the aid effort mounted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Conference Calls Detail Katrina Concerns, Failings (article and audio)
FEMA efforts to house roughly 200,000 evacuees are mired in logistical, bureaucratic and political tangles, according to the Washington Post:
Housing the Displaced Is Rife With Delays
As a panel of House Republicans began an inquiry Thursday into what its chairman described as the ''largely abysmal'' government response to Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana's congressional delegation proposed a broad recovery plan that they estimated would cost $250 billion, The New York Times reports.
Louisiana Lawmakers Propose $250 Billion Recovery Package
Attempting to learn from their mistakes, federal officials are making more careful preparations for Hurricane Rita, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Managing a Hurricane – Differently (subscription required)
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., introduced legislation yesterday that would limit the liability of contractors working on Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, The Washington Post reports.
Bill Would Limit Firms' Liability (fifth item)
September 22, 2005
Champion Enterprises said it received a $60 million order from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to build 2,000 manufactured homes, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Champion builds homes for Katrina victims
The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded Thompson Engineering more than $11 million for quality assurance inspection services in Mississippi.
The Army Corps of Engineers also is surveying small contractors' ability to respond to assistance needs for inbound Hurricane Rita:
Other News
USA TODAY reports that the government's top auditor of relief efforts plans at least to double the number of inspectors policing spending:
Feds try to prevent fraud as cash, contractors roll in
FEMA spokesman Ross Fredenburg denied knowledge of agency contracts for ambulances, despite a contrary report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.
Nursing home evacuations run into snags
House Republicans are moving ahead to investigate the government's response to Katrina without Democrats, who are calling for an independent investigation, The New York Times reports.
G.O.P. in House Plans Inquiry Despite Democrats' Boycott
September 21, 2005
FEMA announced the award of more contracts to construct temporary housing for hurricane evacuees yesterday, providing a windfall to some in the dwindling mobile home industry. Companies that received them included the country's largest mobile home builder, Clayton Homes, as well as Fleetwood Enterprises, Palm Harbor Homes and recreational vehicle manufacturer Gulf Stream Coach. The AP has a briefing:
FEMA OKs mobile homes for Katrina evacuees
The Indianapolis Star says that Indiana stands to benefit:
Fleetwood Homes puts its contract value at more than $170 million:
Fleetwood Accepts Orders to Build Travel Trailers and Homes to Support Disaster Relief Efforts
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that there are five companies providing housing, including Bechtel:
Palm Harbor Homes also received an award:
Palm Harbor Homes hired to build FEMA housing
View FEMA's initial request letter.
The AP reports on the Big Easy hospitality industry, including FEMA-contracted Starwood Hotels and Resorts:
Hotels, resorts rushing to reopen along Gulf Coast to handle rebuilding effort
September 20, 2005
All's mostly quiet on the contracting front this morning, with no new announcements of major awards for Katrina recovery. Amid calls for more oversight of relief contracting, the major papers announce the appointment of FEMA's ex-acting chief financial officer, Matthew Jadacki, to run the Office for Hurricane Katrina Oversight under the Department of Homeland Security. In other news, the head of procurement for OMB, David Safavian, is arrested on charges stemming from the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and contractors are lobbying to protect themselves from liability.
The Wall Street Journal reports that C. Henderson Consulting Inc. was awarded a contract for $5.2 million through the end of the month to provide ambulance services for FEMA, in a profile that looks at one of its subcontracters, GoldStar, one of several relief companies with checkered pasts:
Some Firms Hired in Katrina's Wake Have Checkered Pasts (subscription required)
September 19, 2005
Newsweek tours the rebuilding menagerie being assembled in the Hurricane states, while Detroit Bureau chief Keith Naughton talks contracting with Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred L. Smith:
Katrina Comeback I : Costs, Contracts, Confusion
FEMA is setting up temporary communities, built by companies like Fluor Corporation and Clayton Homes of Maryville, Tenn.:
Recipe for an Instant Town: Find Land, Add Trailers
The New York Times says FEMA's aid efforts are stumbling:
FEMA's work not enough, officials say
Labatt Food Services and Selrico Services set the table for evacuees as well as their normal military base clients:
Local food-service firms Labatt, Selrico feeding storm victims
On Friday, FEMA said it had spent $763 million aiding state and local governments so far:
More Than $760 Million In Federal Dollars To Help Louisiana
Wall Street is smiling about Shaw and other contractors, according to Bloomberg News:
September 16, 2005
Pivoting off the president's speech, the AP has a quick summary of some of the projected rebuilding costs:
Many of todays newspapers feature articles about the questions regarding overall rebuilding costs:
Economists, Housing Experts Question Proposals (The Washington Post)
G.O.P. Split Over Big Plans for Storm Spending (The New York Times)
Conservatives Balk As Spending Soars In Katrina's Wake (The Wall Street Journal, subscription required)
USA TODAY explores continuing logjams in the use of contracted relief efforts and Jim Drinkard offers a rundown on some relief spending so far.
Help is on the way, but it's unclear where
U.S. government has doled out $13.7B on Katrina relief
Yesterday's Washington Post ran an analysis of spending misgivings.
Bush to Request More Aid Funding
The Department of Homeland Security has named a "special inspector general" to handle Hurricane Katrina relief, Sen. Susan Collins told FOX News on Thursday. But the Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said she didn't think the gesture goes far enough.
Katrina Inspector General Appointed
FEMA uses cruise ships as temporary lodging for some:
Cruise Ships, Spurned by Evacuees, Are Home to Displaced City Workers and Families
The Army Corps of Engineers has posted a list of its Katrina contract awards:
Hurricane Katrina Consolidated Contract Listing
The Washington Post takes a look at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' "handshake deals" with Bertucci Construction, Fordice Construction and the Shaw Group.
Government Tries to Balance Scrutiny, Speed
In older news, USA Today explored controversy behind the Shaw and Fluor contract awards:
Contracts for recovery work raise controversy
AP reports that SFA Inc. is providing kits for showers, laundry machines and latrines for 7,000 troops in the Gulf States:
Md. company sending mobile showers, latrines for Bragg soldiers
September 12, 2005
Bechtel
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
Carothers
Emergency Contracts Already in Place
Ceres Environmental Services Inc.
Emergency Contracts Already in Place
CH2M Hill
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
Dewberry
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
Storm Recovery Is More a Mission Than Opportunity
Fluor Corp.
FEMA Contracts to Provide Housing Relief for Displaced Hurricane Victims
IAP Worldwide
Emergency Contracts Already in Place
Kellogg, Brown & Root (Halliburton)
http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/2005/ct20050914.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/2005/ct20050909.html
Phillips and Jordan Inc.
Emergency Contracts Already in Place
The Shaw Group
Emergency Contracts Already in Place
URS Corporation
S.F. engineering firms dispatch crews to gulf
See also: